Fragments
by Blue Shadowdancer
Summary: A downpour of rain in the city masks a catastrophe... how long can it remain unnoticed? Hawkes, Adam, Mac&Stella, Flack&Angell. Now complete.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Well, seems I can't physically stop writing, so here's a new story. Updates may be less regular than before, unfortunately, as I'm really busy at present.**

**I really welcome feedback, especially as I've decided to play with writing characters I've neglected before. There may be pairings, but you'll just have to wait and see, and hope that they survive that long! Also, the first couple of chapters are not so much action, so please bear with me through them.  
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**Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, or the show. Probably to general relief.**

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The city was drowning in walls of water falling vertically from the sky. Ropes of it snaked down window panes, pooled in gutters, drew streams down every slope which then converged to rivers in the streets.

According to some people, this was a good day to commit crimes. According to others, this was not a good day to have to solve them.

Rain lashed and drummed against the glass of the windows as Stella strode quickly, heels clicking out an allegro, into the lab where Hawkes and Danny were examining evidence. She was wearing her coat buttoned up, and looked to be in a hurry. "Danny, you ok to run solo with your mugging vic?" she asked, before either of the men could greet her.

Danny glanced out of the window and shrugged. "Yeah, sure. You claiming the doc?"

She nodded. "Afraid so. We've got a callout, and Mac and Lindsay are already at another scene." She turned to Hawkes. "Can you grab your kit and meet me by the car in five minutes?" Hardly waiting for a reply she headed off intently.

"Sure," Hawkes said to her retreating back. He passed the trace results he was holding to Danny, and headed to his office, where his kit was on the floor by his desk and his coat was over the back of his chair.

Danny was leaning against a wall in the hallway when he came past again. Hawkes looked at his triumphant smile and sighed. "Let me guess. The rain isn't forecast to stop?"

"Nope. You've got the short straw today."

"Have you waited here just so you could gloat?"

"Yep. Mind you," Danny shrugged, "Adam was more fun."

"Adam's coming too?" Hawkes asked in surprise.

"Apparently so. He looked pretty excited about it, despite the rain. Anyway, hadn't you better get going before Stella wonders where you've got to?"

Shaking his head and smiling, Hawkes took the elevator down into the artificial light of the parking garage, where Stella waved him over to the black SUV.

"Did Danny slow you down by gloating?" she questioned.

He laughed. "How did you guess that?"

"He hates bad weather and complains like hell whenever I've worked a case with him on a day like this one. There's a reason I called you onto this case and not him."

"No bad deed goes unrewarded," Hawkes commented wryly, gesturing in the direction of the exit, and the threaded sheets of rain."

Stella laughed. "S'only water, Hawkes, you aren't going to melt, I promise. I swear, you're worse than Adam." Adam was sitting in the back seat, smiling at the exchange. Hawkes walked around the front of the car and climbed into the passenger side as Stella slipped into the driver's seat.

"So what's the case?" he asked.

"As far as I can make out from Flack's _very_ descriptive text, a body in an empty office building." She started the engine and drove out through the exit. "Apparently there's no cell service inside, or else he just didn't bother to reply after that." Bucketfuls of water immediately torrented down the windscreen and she switched the wipers on. The drumming on the metal shell of the roof drowned out any impulses towards conversation.

The car fought its way along the road which was beginning to resemble a river, wheels spraying water into the air from the shallow pools. Hardly any other vehicles were foolhardy enough to attempt journeying.

The rain sheeted down the windows, a shifting film of liquid, obscuring the view. It was difficult to imagine it being any worse, or very different, to being completely submerged. "Rain, rain, go to Spain," Adam muttered. He watched his breath condense on the glass, not that he had been able to see anything before beyond grey blurs of buildings and the scattered white of headlights and shop fronts.

"Did you say something?" Hawkes called, catching his reflection in the mirror and twisting his body round to look into the back seat. Adam shook his head, and Hawkes disappeared from his view again.

He shifted his gaze from the heads of Stella and Hawkes back to the misted window. Memories rose up – old rainy day memories from his childhood. The good memories. Comic books in the backseat of cars as they inched their way through a holiday queue. Breathing on the window and drawing shapes in the fog, writing 'HELP' with backwards letters. Songs of summer playing on the radio, crackly and out of focus.

The car at last stopped, and Hawkes and Stella exchanged looks. Stella gestured at the blurred world of shades of grey on the passengers' side. "That way! Just get inside the door!" She half-shouted to make sure they both heard properly over the percussion orchestra on the roof. "Come on!" she yelled, and Adam pushed open his door, grabbing his case from next to him.

The whole of the East River and Hudson combined seemed to pour down over him, drenching into him immediately. He slammed the door shut and followed the shape of Hawkes in his black coat, arm over his head, case slamming awkwardly into the side of his leg as he ran. Almost straight away he slipped and fell to his knees, pushing himself up quickly and racing for the shelter of the building, splashing through the puddles to reach the open doorway.

Hawkes set down his case and began brushing loose water from the surface of his coat. Adam blundered in after him and shook his head vigorously, droplets of water flying from his hair. There was mud on the knees of his water-strippled jeans. "Stella with you?" Hawkes asked him.

Adam peered out of the doorway. "Dunno. I thought she was just behind me."

Hawkes shrugged. "Perhaps she's drowned." Adam laughed slightly at the joke, water beginning to seep from his trainers to pool around his feet as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

Stella emerged from the grey curtains of the rain, one hand held to cover her face, pulling the door quickly closed behind her. The noise of the falling water diminished.

She was soaked too, her hair darkened and separated into strands, but she looked as if she was enjoying herself. "You didn't wait for me?" she asked, grinning. Droplets ran from her curls and splashed on the bare concrete of the floor.

"We thought you'd been washed away," Hawkes said.

"My case was in the trunk," she said, a wry smile on her face. "Forgot about the rain when I put it in there."

Hawkes laughed. "Well, you're the one who pulled us out in weather like this."

"I suppose I am," she conceded. She gathered up her hair in an attempt to squeeze the water out of it, and succeeded in getting a cold stream to trickle down her back, beneath her collar. "Ugh. Where's Flack?"

"Is he supposed to be here?"

"I presumed so." She strode through the empty room to where a stairwell folded away upwards. "Flack!" she yelled, her voice echoing.

A door to the side of her jolted open, and Flack appeared round it. "It's the three drowned rats," he greeted them cheerfully. "The doc doesn't look as bad as you and Ross, though."

Adam again smiled uncertainly at the joke, but no one was looking at him. Flack made him nervous. His sodden clothes were stuck against his skin by the water they held, and he wished again that he'd brought his coat. But when Stella had stuck her head into his lab, clearly in a hurry, and told him that she wanted him down by her car immediately or sooner, he hadn't wanted to annoy her by taking the time to fetch it from the locker room. Especially, he hadn't wanted to run the gauntlet of Danny's jibes again on the way back from his locker.

But then they'd been waiting for Hawkes for several minutes afterwards, so it had probably been the wrong choice.

Stella and Hawkes followed Flack into the room he'd come from, and Adam trailed after them. He looked around, expecting to see a body, but apparently it wasn't in here. There was only Flack's coat thrown over a wooden crate, this seating obviously the room's main attraction as it was otherwise completely bare. He waited for one of the other two to voice the obvious question. It was Stella.

"No body, Don?" she asked. "I mean, I know you didn't do a science degree or anything, but…"

"Ha ha," he retorted. "You think I was gonna sit by some dead guy while you took your time getting here?"

"So where is the dead guy?" Hawkes asked.

"Upstairs," Flack said. He seemed to realise that this answer wasn't terribly helpful. "Gunshot wound to the chest."

"Why are we in here, then?" Stella asked. "Afraid you'll faint at the sight of blood?"

"Because I'm getting my coat, and you followed me. I know I'm supposed to stay here, but I've just got another call, Angell wants help somewhere. As you little fishes may have noticed, it's chaos today with this weather. You don't need babysittin', do you?"

Stella rolled her eyes. "Run along then, or swim along, might be quicker. You need to run through the case with us first, though."

"Yeah, I was comin' to that. Ok, this building was scheduled for demolition today, a couple of workers were checking it over and found our vic, third floor up. That's your primary crime scene, judging by the amount of blood. There's no obvious sign of a struggle, but then everything's been stripped back to concrete and breezeblocks, so it's kinda hard to tell. No gun, neither."

"Ok, got it," Hawkes said. "Which room is it?"

Flack pulled his coat from the crate and hit it roughly to shake the clinging dust off. "The one with the body in. The door's open, it's hard to miss." He shrugged his arms into the sleeves and began to button it up.

"Take your litter with you," Stella ordered him. Flack picked up the wrapper from a bar of chocolate which had fallen out of his coat as he put it on.

"Want some?" he asked. He pulled another, unopened, bar from his pocket. Adam, still hovering unnoticed and invisible beyond the threshold, watched him snap it into three chunks, and hand a piece each to Stella and Hawkes, taking a bite from the third piece himself before slipping it back into his pocket. He buttoned up his coat and grabbed a black umbrella from where it had lain against the wall.

"Damn, I should have brought one of those!" Stella complained. She swiped at the wet mass of her hair again, tiny droplets showering from it.

Flack grinned. "Yeah, but you didn't though, and nor did any of you, so evidently I'm the most intelligent one here, despite your fancy science degrees." Stella narrowed her eyes at him, and he waved the umbrella in her face. "I'll be off now, have fun!"

Adam stepped back out of the way into the hall as Flack came out of the door. Stella walked with him to the front door, while Hawkes also stopped and waited next to Adam. He went to put the chunk of chocolate he held into his pocket, then suddenly stopped. "You didn't get any, did you?" he asked, guilty at the realisation.

Adam shook his head mutely and looked at his feet, uncomfortable that this fact had been noticed. Hawkes snapped the chocolate in two, and held one half out to Adam. "You need to speak up for yourself, man, we forgot you were there!" He felt the words fall flat even as they left his mouth.

"Thanks," Adam muttered. He had never been good at dealing with situations like this, away from the safety of his lab where he was on familiar territory and in control of what happened. He took the proffered piece, and slid it into his pocket without looking at it, but smiled gratefully, just as Hawkes turned his head to see where Stella was. She came striding back towards the two of them.

"Let's go play 'hunt the body', then."


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Thank you to everyone who reviewed my last chapter! And for people who are asking me suspiciously: yes, the cliffhangers do start soon. Not quite yet, though... I have to drop clues first ;)  
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**As always, any reviews and suggestions are very much appreciated, as I'm still experimenting writing certain characters and situations. I'd love to hear what you think!**

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Lindsay had heard of Chinese Water Torture, but she had never realised quite how much it could live up to its name.

Splish.

The bullet hole went right through the ceiling of the room she was processing, and had broken the skylight in the roof on the next level. So rain was beating into the loft, eager to have found an entry point, a weakness in the structure, and every now and then a droplet from the growing puddle up there found its way down the small hole, to splash into the diluting blood pool on the laminated wood flooring.

Splish.

Then a varying pause, while her ears strained to catch the next drop, in a state of constant expectation of it.

Splish.

It was driving her crazy. She wished protocol, and the need to preserve evidence, didn't forbid her from mopping up the blood and putting something soft there instead to absorb the dripping silently.

Splish.

The door opened, and Mac entered. "You've found it?" she asked hopefully.

Splish.

"Yes." He held up a small evidence envelope. "The bullet ricocheted after breaking the window; it didn't have enough momentum to get outside. Thankfully for us, because we'd never find it if it had. It's deformed, but it's a .38 calibre round."

"That's all the bullets recovered, then. One in her shoulder, a through-and-through from his leg I pulled from the wall, and that one."

Mac looked again round the sparsely but expensively furnished living room. The woman lying on the floor was wearing a dressing gown, fabric which had quickly soaked up blood, turning the blue to purple. A knife handle stuck from her chest.

"Why shoot someone and then stab them?" Lindsay asked. "I mean, why not just shoot her and be done with it?"

"Perhaps the shots were never intended to be fatal," Mac suggested. "It seems personal to me. The killer could have wanted her to know exactly what was happening."

Lindsay shuddered. Another pearl of water dropped ripples into the redness beside her, and she made a small involuntary noise of irritation. Mac heard her, and guessed its cause.

"How are you doing with evidence collection?"

"I'm done, I think. There's no obvious evidence of an intruder, but hopefully we'll be able to find something at the lab. There certainly doesn't seem to be anything here, unless the fingerprints match to anyone in the system. Even the door doesn't make sense." The frustration showed in her voice.

Splish.

The furnishings in the room were perfectly undisturbed. The only indication of a violent murder was Rosie Saunders's body, the bullet holes in the wall and ceiling, and the door, the lock of which had been smashed down by the police officers who'd responded to the report of shots fired.

Mac considered. "Chances are, our killer has a key. It isn't a self locking door, "

"But didn't the building supervisor say that Miss Saunders here lived alone?"

Mac smiled slightly. "He did." He stood with the air of waiting for her to continue.

Lindsay considered. "She might have given a spare key to one of his neighbours, in case of an emergency."

Mac nodded. "I've already had a couple of the unis do a canvass. No one on this floor or the ones directly above or below have admitted to holding a spare key, or even knowing Miss Saunders personally. Apparently she kept to herself."

"Is this a test?" Lindsay asked suspiciously. "Because you keep leading me to say things, but you've already thought of them."

Mac laughed. "Just seeing if you're coming to the same conclusions as me."

"Well, I haven't exactly been able to get to a conclusion yet, unless someone's discovered the principle of walking through walls. Have you?"

"I don't draw conclusions this early in the investigation."

"Yes, I know," she sighed. "Follow the evidence, right?"

He nodded. "I think we're done here for now. Let's get back to the lab and run trace from her clothes, and the fingerprints we've pulled from the door."

Lindsay stood up, only too pleased to be away from the irregular dripping. She gestured towards the window. "Is it me, or is the rain getting worse?"

Mac studied the falling water. "Hard to say. Either way, it'll take us a while to get back."

Splish.

- - - - -

Flack groaned at the sight greeting him as he stopped his car. He got out reluctantly, opening his umbrella to shield him as he did so.

He glanced around for a second until his attention was caught by a shout, and splashed through the rising streams and lakes to where Angell was waving him over. She was wearing a yellow hi-vis jacket over her dark waterproof coat. Water slicked her hair to her scalp, and he held the umbrella over both of them, raindrops drumming onto the fabric.

"You kiddin' me?" he asked grumpily. "I'm a highly trained homicide detective and I get called to a car pile-up in this weather?"

"Stop whining," she told him. Strands of dark hair were stuck to her cheek-bones. "Everyone's busy today. The highly trained homicide detectives get the privilege of being called to the fatality wrecks instead of the rest of the pile-ups that are going on."

"The crime scene I just left was indoors," he pointed out. There was nowhere to stand that wasn't partly submerged. Water seeped in through the eyelets on his shoes, soaked possessively into the hems of his pants.

She raised an eyebrow. "Keep on whinging like that and you can have a case of attempted murder to investigate too. Or rather, you won't, because I'm good enough not to leave any evidence. I don't want to be here either, particularly, so shut up and be thankful."

"Thankful? What the hell for?"

She shrugged, grinning. "Thankful that there's no wind, so you can use your umbrella? Thankful that Messer's not here to wind you up? Thankful that, despite your blatant eyeing me up, I'm not filing a harassment suit? Whatever warms the cockles of your heart, detective."

He glared at her cheerfulness, but knew implied blackmail when he heard it. "Ok, ok. Let's get to it."

"That's the spirit." She winked at him.

- - - - -

Sid watched the raindrops hurl themselves at the glass of the window, mesmerised by the patterns they formed as they slid down the pane, defeated in their attempt to smash through. Today would soon become a busy one for him, judging by the spate of telephone calls the morgue had received so far, notifying him of the imminent arrival of more of the dead.

For now, though, he had time to stare out at the pouring rain. Plenty of time, amongst the stainless steel coffins holding bodies, which lay silent as the graves they would enter soon. The dead didn't complain, or speak, or pass judgement, and in many ways he felt that they were easier to deal with than the living. He thought of Sheldon, who had moved from here out to talk to and examine the living again, and was glad that it wasn't his job. Especially on a day like this one.

The rain-threads wove themselves into tapestries as he watched, patterns, ghosts, forming and dissolving, reforming and dissolving. Maybe the future was drawn in the grey sheets of flowing cloth, for those who could read it. But the half-formed shapes and faces blurred into each other too fast for him to catch.

Quick footsteps announced Danny's arrival, snapping him out of the half-thoughts falling through his mind, and back into the imitation sunlight of the room. "Hey Sid," Danny greeted him. "I'm here for autopsy results, Claire Martell."

Sid's face creased in confusion. "I've been trying to contact Sheldon. I thought he was coming to pick them up."

"Nah," Danny said. "The doc's gone out to a scene with Stell and Adam. I'm all alone here."

"Not nice weather to be out in," commented Sid as he slid open one of the metal drawers. "How did you manage to avoid being called out yourself?"

Danny grinned. "Dunno, but I'm not complaining."

"Well, I hope your luck holds," Sid told him. "Now, your victim. COD is exsanguination. Her throat was cut, as you can see."

"Yeah, guessed that much."

Sid nodded his head sadly. "She was attacked from behind. Probably didn't even see her attacker."

"Yeah." Danny glanced at Claire Martell's cold face once more. "Please say you have something useful?"

Sid unclipped his glasses from his face. "Actually, I do. I already know who killed her."

"Really?" asked Danny, slightly incredulously.

"Oh yes. I don't joke." He strolled across the room and slid open another drawer. "Here you are. Iain Abbots, 28 years old. He ran out into the street next to the alleyway where your victim was attacked, and was hit by a car."

Danny still looked sceptical. "And…"

Sid smiled triumphantly. "He had her wallet in his pocket, as well as a knife with her blood on. Kendall ran it."

"How come you didn't tell me?" There was an injured tone to Danny's voice.

"I didn't know that you were on the case, or I would have. As I said, I thought it was Sheldon's, so Kendall brought the results to me when she couldn't find him, but if he's out in the rain that isn't very surprising. I called his cell phone only a few minutes ago to tell him, but it went to voicemail so I left a message."

"Huh." Danny clearly wasn't going to give up his chance to sulk this easily, despite Sid's calm tone. "Well, case closed, I guess."

"I hope everyone's alright, out there," Sid said.

"Course they are. Anyway, I'd better get on with verifying and doing the paperwork from this one. Thanks for solvin' it, Sid."

"You're welcome," Sid said as Danny disappeared, doors to the morgue swinging closed behind him.

He turned again to the window, a worried frown creasing his forehead slightly. The raindrops continued their slow assault on the glass, wiping away the world outside in their merging patterns. He wished that his friends weren't outside today.

Ghosts formed and dissolved as he watched, formed and dissolved.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: Thank you very much for all your reviews so far! I really appreciate them, and they help a lot with writing. Do please feel free to add more, with comments, criticisms, whatever you feel like.  
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Hawkes crouched beside the body, shining his flashlight into the man's chest where the bullet had ripped it open. The raw flesh gleamed stickily in the bright light. Stella took pictures, mindful of the blood which was coagulating on the floor.

The man hadn't died immediately, that was clear. There were smears of blood across the floor, and on his hands. He'd flailed around in his death throes, but not for long enough to receive help or to help himself.

"I'd estimate time of death as four to five hours ago," Hawkes said. "Bullet's lodged in his chest cavity, we'll retrieve it at autopsy. It looks like a close range shot to me."

Stella glanced at her watch. "Final safety checks were carried out four hours ago, according to Flack. He must have been killed only just before."

There was blood smeared onto the fabric at the hip of his jeans, around the pocket, but none in the surrounding area. Stella took another photograph, and then pressed on the pocket, sliding out a cell phone. "He must have tried to call for help."

Hawkes looked up. "Wound like this, he would have been losing blood extremely fast. He didn't have enough motor function to complete the action."

Stella checked his other pocket and pulled out a wallet. "Here we go. Victim's name is Jude Allan. Twenty-six years old." She showed the driver's licence to Hawkes.

Adam was hovering behind Stella, water still seeping from his sodden trainers. His place in the attention of the other two was after the body, but he thought he preferred that. The body was, well – dead – and deserved attention before being forgotten, as all bodies were forgotten sooner or later. With his eyes he followed the line of damp footprints he'd marked in the dust across the floor, dust now dark with moisture. The thought drifted through his mind that if he vanished this second, they were proof that he'd existed.

He should be concentrating on evidence of the killer, not of him. With an effort he dragged his attention back, in time for Stella to twist round, searching him out.

"Ok, Adam, could you do a sweep of the room please, and check for any trace or prints? I'll deal with the body."

"You've forgotten about me," Hawkes pointed out with a smile. He absently trod his foot over one of Adam's dark prints, smearing it to indistinctness.

"No I haven't. I need you to look around the building, see if you can see any signs of how our killer got in, if that's ok with you."

"Sure." Hawkes took the camera from his kit, and a stack of evidence markers. "I'll have a look around and come back." He noticed Adam checking the floor, staying out of Stella's sightline for now, and had the temptation to say something encouraging, but decided against it.

Hawkes walked slowly down the stairs, eyes peeled for anything unusual, but in a place scheduled for demolition there wasn't anything to easily leave traces that he could see, even shining his flashlight into all the corners. The windows were boarded up, empty of glass, and he could still hear the regular drumming of the rain, sounding far away somehow, as if he were a worm under the ground but still hearing it, muffled.

The entrance hall, and the front door, seemed undisturbed. No sign of a break-in, at this point anyway. He turned and walked past the stairs in the opposite direction, still shining his flashlight around him as he went, sharper light in the dimmer tube lights set against the ceiling. The camera beeped at him, and the screen died. No battery.

One of the doors was ajar. The others were shut. He looked closer, and saw that there was no sheen of dust on the metal handle. He pushed the evidence markers into his pocket, drawing his gun, setting the useless camera on the floor. With his fingertips he found the wooden edge of the door.

He pulled it open, flashlight and gun pointing inwards.

A flight of stairs led down, in darkness.

- - - - -

Adam obediently paced the floor slowly, scanning with his eyes and taking photographs. At first he was careful in the way he placed his feet, wary of drawing attention with creaking floorboards and loud footsteps. Soon, however, he became absorbed in what he was doing, too absorbed for his shyness to control his every movement, lost in the flow of facts which whispered enticingly to him from each directional drop of blood, each smudge in the dust which could be a footprint, each surface he dusted for prints.

He pretended inside his head that he was a proper CSI, with a police badge. As the evidence collection became routine in the windowless room he wove it into a more elaborate fantasy, one featuring him as the hero, in which he chased suspects in running gun battles down streets, found vital pieces of evidence which cracked supposedly unbreakable cases, leapt from buildings seconds before they exploded behind him.

On a roll with his imaginings, he still managed to focus on what he was actually doing. A few dark hairs were on the floor, next to and in the blood pool, and some blonde ones that had probably come from Allan. Breaking from adding layers of detail to his illustrious CSI career, he kneaded the facts which he could see in his mind, not daring to voice them in case they were wrong. He didn't want Stella to think him stupid.

There had probably been a fight, he concluded, between Allan and a dark haired man. Of course, it could be a dark haired woman with a short haircut, but he decided that made his scenario too complicated for now. The layer of dust on the bare floor wasn't thick enough to hold prints, but it did display scuffle marks, a lot of which were probably covered by the blood. Maybe they had been fighting over the gun? With the question popping into his mind first, he looked to justify it, and came up with the realisation that if the other man had intended to kill Allan straight away, he would just have shot him, so they probably were fighting. Also, Stella had been collecting evidence directly from the body for a while, as well as taking photographs of the wound tract, also suggesting that the attacker had had close contact, and therefore left a lot of trace.

He had finished with the rest of the room. He briefly contemplated pretending to carry on processing until Stella stopped looking so busy, and retreating back into his daydream, but after grappling with his conscience for a few seconds he decided to speak.

"Uh, Stella?"

"Yeah?" she asked, looking up, surprised. Adam had been processing in absolute silence, and she had almost forgotten that he was there.

"I don't think there's any more evidence in here. I mean, I can't see any more. What should I do now?"

- - - - -

Hawkes descended the stairs with soft, padding steps. His gun was drawn, and his unlit flashlight was in his other hand, the knuckles of which he slid against the wall for guidance. There had been a light switch at the top, but nothing had happened when he had flicked it on. He had followed the narrow beam of his flashlight for a few steps, and then decided he felt safer in the dark, when he wasn't shining what felt like a sign pointing to his position.

Accordingly he moved slowly, each foot feeling for the next step but avoiding shuffling sideways once he hit one. Perhaps he was being overcautious, but that was who he was. Cautious. He had no idea whether there was anyone down here or not, and he had no intention of finding out until the circumstances were a little less uneven.

His next foot hit solidity unexpectedly, almost throwing him off balance. At the same time the wall against his hand cornered away from him. He held his breath, listening.

Anyone else on the team, he thought grimly, would be better off than him in this situation. He had far less experience in this sort of thing. He probably shouldn't have come down here. What did he have on his side?

Logic. That was what he had. It would be inefficient for the stair and basement lights to come on at the same time. Therefore it was likely that there would be a light switch on the wall near to him. If there was someone down here then they would probably have bolted here when the workmen entered to carry out the safety checks, so their eyes would be adjusted to the dark and turning on the light would blind them. It would blind him too, but hopefully to a lesser extent.

However, if _he_ was on the other side of a situation like that then he would equally be able to anticipate that happening, and would probably shoot blindly at the stair entrance – towards his current position. Therefore his best chance would be to run to one side or the other and hopefully be able to find shelter. Any attacker would almost certainly be as far away from the stairs as possible, to avoid detection. But the attacker could also anticipate him running, and there might be no cover in the basement for him to find.

For precious seconds he hesitated, caught in the trap of his own reasoning. He felt sideways along the wall, and his hand slid over what was undeniably a light switch. He had a sudden vision of leaving, of feeling his way up the stairs, his back turned on the large space, an easy target.

He flicked on the light.

As the hum and orange flickering glow of the florescent tubes began blinking into life he ran, shoes loud in his ears on the echoing concrete, pinpointing his position. In the seconds of dim light he saw large pillars blocked against the paler flickering walls and ran towards the nearest, aware that he would also be visible to anyone watching.

Nothing happened.

The strip-lights ignited, a blinding flash of light. He forced his eyes as far open as he could against the reflexive protection of his retinas which tried to force them closed. Blinking furiously, he strained his ears to catch any sound above the electric hum of the lights, but the whiteness was deadening his sensations.

His breathing steadied as day vision returned. He shoved the flashlight into his pocket, taking his gun in both hands. He had no idea whether anyone was sharing the room with him or not. He stepped out from behind the pillar.

"NYPD! Come out with your hands up!"

No movement caught his eye as he quickly scanned the basement, then scanned slower, in more detail. There were no dividing walls, but a great many pillars squatted at regular intervals, supporting the weight of the walls and floors above. The start of an upwards sloping ramp on the wall to his left was cut off by a heavy metal pair of doors, chained an bolted from inside. It was clearly a storage area, judging by the empty crates piled around and abandoned.

With still no movement visible, he advanced. It was when he reached the middle of the basement that he noticed the explosives packed around the pillars at each of the four corners. He swallowed nervously. The demolition by detonation may have been postponed, but he still wasn't keen on being around live explosives.

It seemed a long way through the room, closing in on the furthest corner. He had almost convinced himself that there was no one there, and let himself relax slightly.

He stopped.

There was a noise.

He strained his ears to hear.

Shuffle.

Click.

Bang.

A burning hailstorm of gunfire erupted through the basement.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: Again, thank you all very much for the reviews. I really do love getting them, they're great motivation! This is a shorter chapter, I know, but I didn't think it worked as well when it was longer.  
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Hawkes dived for the protection of the nearest pillar, the roar of gunshots slamming and ricocheting off the walls, the bullets themselves lost in the confusion. His own gun ready, but unsure as to the location of his target, he paused for a second, needing the rebounding echoes to die away, leaving the waiting silence behind.

He slid the top half of his body sideways, to look. "NYPD! Drop your weapon and come out!" he shouted again. He didn't want to resort to shooting unless he had to, and he couldn't see any movement to give the shooter's position away.

He jerked backwards, away from the searching bite of gunshots which were his answer. Whoever he was chasing seemed to have poor aim, he thought, with grim humour.

He risked another glance. There. A flicker of colour, just for an instant, out of place among the dull greys. For the first time, the odds began to even for him. He locked the position into his mind.

- - - - -

"I'm going to go and see where Hawkes has got to," Stella said, with a slight frown. "He's been gone for a while, he might have found something. You ok on your own here for a bit?"

"Sure," Adam said, shooting a slightly uneasy glance at the body. He repeated his question. "What do you want me to do here?"

She glanced around the room. She'd watched Adam for a while earlier, out of the corner of her eye mostly, although he had quickly become so absorbed in processing that she'd doubted he'd have noticed a marching band parade past the door as long as they stayed out of his way. Maybe even if they hadn't stayed out of his way; the day before she'd watched with amusement as he'd walked straight into a glass wall at the lab while absorbed in examining trace reports, and he'd simply rebounded off and corrected his course without looking up.

Considering his question, she looked at the body again. "I need you to do a once-over on Allan, check if I've missed anything. A fresh pair of eyes'd be useful." Despite the task seeming superficial to her, even as she said it his face lit up, and she found herself smiling back at his obvious pleasure that she was asking _him_ to scrutinise _her_ work, rather than the other way around.

Turning in the doorway, she watched him crouch down next to the body, the trepidation that being alone with it was causing him obviously matched and outweighed by the pride installed by her trust in him. She found herself smiling again. It was nice, having someone around who accepted so unconditionally any small offering metered out to him.

She began to walk down the corridor, towards the stairwell. "Hawkes?" she called.

No answer.

- - - - -

Another thunderstorm of flying bullets, this time with no chance of hitting him as he was still protected by the concrete. When a pause came, he returned fire for the first time, ducking back for the returning wave. He glanced behind him, instinctively recording data, possible trajectories, final locations of the deadly pieces of metal.

And his mind suddenly seemed to freeze and leap ahead of him at the same time as he realised fully what was in a direct line from him, at the far corner of the basement.

In a direct line from a man who would be unable to continue missing that unintentional target for very much longer.

Facts and figures. Inescapable facts he wished he didn't know, but they were branded onto the surface of his mind. Average speed of a bullet in air, 800 m/s. Average weight, thirty grams. Kinetic energy, which transferred to heat energy as it traveled and upon contact. More than enough to strike a spark, incite a momentary current as it sheared though a package of volatile and only temporarily stabilised chemicals to hit a wire, the metal of the blasting cap, but there could be enough energy even if the bullet missed the metal altogether, searing through the closely packed nitroglycerine molecules. A millisecond of heat from the burning bullet, the millisecond needed to reach flashpoint.

- - - - -

"Hawkes?" Stella called again, the corridor of the floor below where she had left Adam stretching out in front of her. The staircase wound up and down to each side of her. She hesitated for a second, and headed past closed doors, checking this floor, just in case. She opened each door as she passed it and stood under the lintel while her eyes briefly examined the now unconcealed room beyond.

- - - - -

A building scheduled for demolition.

And just one bullet, missing its intended target, but greedily latching to the bearing that would find it a better one.

- - - - -

Adam straightened up, camera held in front of him, taking a last wide-angle shot of the body. The light flashed. The shutter clicked.

- - - - -

Hawkes was very still. His muscles and brain froze. There was no time to do anything, no time at all.

The picture which flashed into his mind was Danny. Danny saying, "Boom."

Prophetic.

- - - - -

Blinding heat. Burning light. A flashpoint of sound.

The pillar crumbled and shattered apart in the force of the explosion, molecules of air and dust hurtled outwards, a tsunami of volume and pressure to smash everything out of its way, picking up paper-light dolls and flinging them recklessly ahead, scraping and clawing at the skin of the walls, the metal ribs hidden in the floors above.

Joints slipped, joins cracked open. The steel bones, weakened for this purpose, bent and snapped under the strain, the weight above pushing down and falling faster, faster, the whole acceleration of gravity pulling. The room folded at the corner, floors bending, stressing, reaching breaking point, passing it. The shockwave rippled up through the walls, deforming, tearing, flaking the structure, a tower built of ashes blown apart in a storm.

The building from the outside folded into one corner as it collapsed, buckling and rippling down in the shockwave as if built from playing cards. Paint and plaster sheared away, flakes spinning and flittering in the air, a maelstrom of pale locusts swarming amid the destruction. Glass shivered into liquid sheets, joining with and falling with the splintered sheets of glassy rain. Shattered breezeblocks gusted though the whirlpool of air currents, smashing, crashing, and concrete thudded down to the earth where it took root. Flat cracked to jagged splinters, angular was sheared to smooth, solid disintegrated to ricocheting, barraging particles, gaps of air solidified to chaotic tangled barricades.

Dust liberated from the building and stolen from the earth flew up in clouds, billowing, rolling, and was compressed back to mud by the fierce pounding of the oppressing rain.

The building demolished itself, structural suicide, on schedule.

Stillness regained itself.

The rain fell relentlessly.

* * *

**A/N part 2: I asked my ex-structural engineer physics teacher for information before I wrote this, so I'm pretty sure that the facts contained within are accurate, although he probably now thinks that I'm a terrorist.  
**


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: Firstly, I know I'd said I'd have this chapter up for Sunday, so I apologise. Life got in the way, and I wasn't happy about how this was turning out - hopefully it's not too bad now, but please let me know either way! (I think it's because I know exactly what happens in the next few chapters, but getting there was the problem.)  
**

**Thank you again to everyone who's been reviewing! :)  
**

* * *

"It'd probably be quicker to walk, almost."

Mac said nothing in reply to Lindsay. He stared absently out of the window at the falling water, a numbness stealing into him as he watched the pieces of the clouds tear apart and spiral down, millions of tiny pieces, a disintegrating puzzle.

_(The raindrops fell, finding a new shape, a new jumble of shapes below them, a chaos to entice them, a place of sharp and unexpected edges, a sepulchral silence contained within)_

The background drumming mixed with a repeating syllable. It hovered over the surface of his consciousness, finally sinking in.

"…Mac?"

"Yes?" he asked, mentally shaking himself, wondering how long she'd been trying to catch his attention.

"We can move." She gestured at the space that had opened up between them and the next car in the traffic queue they had quickly found themselves in, and he slid them forwards a few metres.

They resumed their waiting.

Lindsay's fingers were tapping out a tune on her doorframe. Tap-tap-tap-tap-taaap tap taaap tap tap. Then repeat. The rain blended to the rhythm as he watched.

"What's that?" he asked, finally.

"What?" She had the air of shaking herself back into reality, the same as he'd had a short time ago.

"The tapping," he said. She looked surprised.

"I didn't realise, sorry," she said, and stilled her hand. Silence fell in the car again.

_(Raindrops slid like tears down exposed and snapped steel ribs, pooling on floors newly created, rolling dust particles around them, leaving darker trails behind them, tear tracks over footprints)_

The rain still drummed against the glass and metal, and the longer that neither of them spoke, the louder it seemed to get, pressing into their eardrums until it seemed so loud that it would drown out their words before they even began. Lindsay put out her hand to fiddle with the radio, and then drew it back as she reconsidered. She began to fiddle with a button on the cuff of her jacket, undoing it, redoing it, undoing it.

The line of traffic remained stationary. Mac saw Lindsay checking her watch, again, and looked himself at the clock on the dashboard. Two and a half blocks in twenty minutes. He didn't bother thinking about how long it would take them to get back to the lab at this rate. Lindsay, he noticed, was still looking longingly at the radio. "Turn it on," he told her.

Not having wanted to disturb him before with it, she eagerly complied, but could only get shifting, falling sheets of sound, no matter how long she fiddled with the tuner for. "It's not working, I can't get any station properly," she admitted at last, and turned it off. Her hands were impatient to be doing something, anything, and began twisting the chain of her pendant.

Mac sighed. He watched her fingers flickering, seemingly almost too fast for his eyes to catch. His mind felt leaden, imprisoned by the walls of the car, and the walls of water beyond. Deadened. "I think we should pull in here and go over the evidence. It's better than sitting in a queue doing nothing." He waited for a response from Lindsay, but she assumed he was being rhetorical, and said nothing. There was a clear space on the sidewalk, the bank of the road now turned to a canal, which he sailed the car up onto.

"At least we put the evidence on the back seat, instead of in the trunk," Lindsay pointed out.

"There is that," he agreed. They slid their seats back and he reached over to grab the cameras off the top of the evidence box. "We'll just look at the photographs for now."

"And we've got the laptop," she said as he pulled its case from the floor behind him and passed it to her. She opened it, pressed the power button, and waited for it to boot. "Can you hand me the memory card from your camera, please?"

He popped it out from the camera and passed it to her. "While you do that I'll make a couple of phone calls, let people know where we are. Otherwise they might start thinking something's happened to us."

"Good idea."

He slid his cell phone from his pocket, and frowned at the screen as it lit up. "No service. Do you have any?"

_(Shades of silence wafted through rooms which were no longer rooms and up and down the concertinaed stairs, ghosts released from inside light bulbs, from between double glazed windows)_

Lindsay checked. "I've got one bar. Everything's probably falling apart because of the weather."

He took the cell as it was offered to him, and dialled the first number that came to mind. "Stella's got no signal either," he commented. He tried a different number, and it rang for a while before being answered.

"Detective Flack."

"It's Mac."

"Why're you on Lindsay's cell?"

"I think my cell network's down. Where are you?"

"Somewhere in the newly discovered Sea of Manhatten. You?"

Mac ignored the sarcasm. "We've parked the car at the side of the street. Is the traffic this choked up everywhere?"

Someone was talking in the background, and there was a pause as Flack presumably listened to what was being said before he answered. "Well, I have a pile-up here that the ambulance has only just managed to get to, and I think there're plenty more of them around. Why've you parked?"

"We'd be driving until tomorrow otherwise. Lindsay and I are about to go over the photos from our crime scene while we wait for the streets to clear a bit. It's funny, all the traffic's appeared in the last hour or so."

"Don't I know it. Stell said she didn't have much trouble getting to her scene either. Maybe I should call her and find her car-repellent secret."

"You can try, but she's on the same network as me. I've already rung her, straight to voicemail."

"Well, that scene didn't have any signal there earlier." Flack seemed to be prolonging the conversation for want of anything better to do. "I wouldn't worry about her."

_(A smashed camera, an iPhone with a shattered screen, a black coat trapped where the concrete floor had ripped up in a tearaway wave, a distorted silver case spilling cracked plastic bottles which leaked chemicals)_

"Is there anyone with you there?" Mac asked.

Flack's voice expressed a shrug. "Emergency services milling around, angry drivers, angry passengers, a couple of amphibious pedestrians, us poor cops trying to keep control, the usual. Angell was here, but she's gone to try and find us coffee and something to eat. Doesn't look as if we'll be moving anytime soon." He broke off, and shouted something indistinct to someone nameless.

"Does he know who's at the lab?" Lindsay asked. Mac repeated her question.

Flack took a second to think about it. "Presumably Messer. Stell had Hawkes and Adam with her. They _could_ be back by now, of course, but I doubt it. If they've any sense they'll stay put for now; at least they've got a solid roof over their heads."

_(Shadows of raindrops flitting over the walls and what had been walls, shadows falling to the dust)_

Seeing that Lindsay had finished downloading images from both cameras and was beginning to flick through them, Mac decided to draw the conversation to a close. "If you manage to get in touch with anyone, can you tell them where we are? I'll try Danny's landline in a minute."

"Sure," Flack agreed. "And if Stella gets through to me I'll let you know, too."

"Thanks."

"You too. Don't drown. Or float out to sea."

Mac snapped the cell closed and passed it back to Lindsay. "It looks as if we'll be here for a while. How've the photos turned out?"

She handed over the laptop to him, and he began flicking through the picture files. The same things that he'd taken note of in the room now jumped out at him even more. Mostly the complete and utter lack of any disturbance at all. "What do you think?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Honestly? What it looks like is that someone walked _through_ the door, shot and stabbed Rosie Saunders, and then left the same way."

"She can't have struggled," Mac said. "There's no blood pattern to suggest she moved at all." His face frowned in confusion, a headache building, fanned by the relentless background noise.

Lindsay flicked again through the photos. "If she didn't move, why the bullet through the ceiling? Even if the shooter missed with one of their shots, the bullet should have ended up in the wall, like the through-and-through did."

"Even more of a puzzle," Mac said. "Why didn't she move between being shot, and being stabbed?" In the unanswerable silence between them that followed his question, he leant his head back against his seat, lifting his eyes from the screen to stare again at the shifting grey patterns left by the rain. It trickled desolately down the windscreen.

_(The walls lying in pieces, cracked and split, gaping wounds in the building's skin)_

Lindsay leant her head against the fogging glass, stands of hair printing trails as they lifted away streaks of moisture, kneading her fists into her eyelids. "You ok?" he asked her.

"Yeah, just tired, I guess. You called me onto shift early."

"Sorry."

"S'ok. If we don't move soon, though, I'll probably end up falling asleep here."

Mac laughed slightly, checking his cell again, where he'd lain it next to the gear stick. Still no signal. Still the falling water. He glanced at the photographs again, and then closed the laptop lid, aware that neither of them were in a concentrating mood. "We need to call Danny," he remembered aloud.

She groaned slightly. "Ok, I'll do that now."

He half-watched her fish through her pockets for the cell, rain still falling through him, washing into blank spaces which seemed to have opened up inside him. He thought about the whole world being covered in water, and how very small they were in this tiny metal shell in a vast ocean. They could be washed out to sea, as Flack had said, and in this weather no one would be watching, no one would miss them until it was already too late to recover them. The thought fascinated him, lapping at his consciousness.

_(The weeping sky hung low over the wreckage, clouds keening, the grey raindrops sliding inside uninvited, searching, looking for life to draw them onwards, still searching, still searching, still not finding) _

"Are _you_ ok, Mac?" Lindsay asked. She'd been watching him, her fingers resting on her cell's key pad, paused halfway through tapping out Danny's number. "You look shattered."

He nodded, slowly. He was tired. _Shattered,_ he thought. That described his state of mind perfectly. "Yeah, I am. I don't know why."


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: Thank you for bearing with me! Most unfortunately, A2 levels require revision, which eats into my writing time. I'm trying to get chapters done as quickly as possible, however. And thank you very much for the great reviews! They're wonderful to read, and useful for future writing. :)**

* * *

Facts.

They were what came back to him first, before proper awareness, before thought. Facts sinking slowly through his mind, trying to suggest that he ought to wake up and take notice of them, but he was content just letting them slide by, not really thinking about them, not searching for any connections between them, although his mind made them on his behalf, out of habit.

_Density of concrete is 2400 kg to the cubic metre. Five litres of blood in a human body. Iron forms haemoglobin, forms oxyhaemoglobin. Oxygen. Group 2 elements. Nitrogen. Fluorine. Neon. No, back to oxygen. Three minutes of life without oxygen. Breathe. Keep breathing._

He felt as if he was trapped in glue. Everything about him felt heavy, and although he wasn't moving, there was the overwhelming feeling that he _couldn't _move, even if he tried. _Downwards gravitational force of 9.81 Newtons per kg. _As soon as he became aware that he was breathing, it immediately became immeasurably hard work to keep his chest rising and falling.

_Diaphragm contracts, external intercostal muscles contract, thorax volume increases, air moves in down a pressure gradient. Pressure… something about pressure. Force divided by area. No, something else. A pressure wave, a ride of a few seconds ending in blackness…_

Memories flooded back, jolting him to awakeness. An explosion. The stray bullet which had triggered the detonation.

He opened his eyes.

There was a gun barrel pointed at him.

For a second, the shock of that fact was all that registered, forcing out all the others, then he realised he could see it because it was being purposely illuminated by a flashlight beam. Not _his_ flashlight. The beam was a different shade. Photons of different wavelengths resonating through the air at different frequencies. Darkness was packed tight into the spaces of everywhere else.

"You awake?" asked a voice.

Hawkes blinked his eyes, and nodded, then wondered if that gesture could be seen. He cleared his throat, swirling saliva around in his mouth and swallowing a layer of bone-dry dust. "Yes."

"I've got your gun. Don't attack me or I'll shoot you." It was a man's voice, a young man.

Hawkes cautiously sat up. Pain shot through his ribs as he moved, sharper than the dull ache all over him. He pressed his hand against them, waiting for his quickened breathing to return to its normal rate. His head was pounding. "I'm not going to attack you."

The rod of his flashlight pressed against his hip, and he slowly slid it out of his pocket. Since he wasn't challenged, he turned it on.

"Don't look at me!" There was a fearful intensity, almost panic, in the man's voice.

"Ok. I won't look at you." He saw no point in either arguing or making further conversation. There was no response, and Hawkes eased himself around. His flashlight beam played over devastation. The other flashlight clicked off.

They were in the far corner of the basement from where the explosion must have come. The two corner walls were still standing, but the two of them were trapped by the ceiling, which had crumpled down, slumped, to join to a massive pile of rubble with the floor. He must have been thrown to here by the force of the blast and probably slammed against a wall, which would explain the pain from his entire body. He turned his mind away from the thought of that, the thought of how close he must have come to ending up on Sid's table, picturing the Y-incision into his chest, Sid pulling his glasses in two as he pronounced cause of death.

Another snake of thought slithered into his mind from out of the darkness, fangs reared to strike.

The building. His thoughts were still confused, still jumbled. The whole building must have come down, with a quarter of its support suddenly and unexpectedly removed. Above him, pinning him in, was the weight of storeys upon storeys of concrete, wood, glass, metal, tonnes and tonnes of it pressed down, ready to fall and crush him –

Stella. And Adam.

They would have had no idea at all, no warning, until suddenly everything collapsed around them. Ceilings falling as crushing weights, walls toppling, floors cracking to chasms. He rotated the structure in his head, trying to work out which corner the crime scene was closest to. If it was above him now they might have had a chance, but if it was over the corner which had collapsed… He refused to think about that possibility. _Go back to logic._

All logic told him was that he couldn't do anything to help. And that in the meantime he was stuck, maybe with a limited air supply, with a man who had previously done his best to shoot him and now controlled both their guns. Not to mention that he had almost certainly committed the murder upstairs.

"You've probably killed us both," he said, his voice flat. He turned his flashlight off and sat in the darkness, straining his eyes for another light, a light that didn't exist.

The reply came eventually, pleadingly. "I didn't – I didn't mean to."

"Oh yeah?" The claustrophobic panic and worry burst out of him in a flood of anger he hardly recognised. "So it makes it better that you were trying to shoot me, does it? The fact that you're suffering from your actions absolves you of blame?"

"I've got your gun – "

"What, you want to be stuck here with a decaying body? My friends are here. They were upstairs, with the man you shot, Allan. I know it was you who killed him. One of my friends, he's not that old. The last time he was in the field wasn't exactly that great for him either, and now because of you, he might be dead."

He heard the other man intake air, ready to form it to speech. And then release the air again.

Silence reached him through the dark, huddled close around him.

- - - - -

Flack hailed Angell as he saw her approach, carrying a plastic covered package cradled in her arms. She nodded in acknowledgement and altered her course, steering towards him, smiling. "Why're you still so damn cheerful?" he asked her accusingly as she reached speaking distance.

"I like the rain," she told him. He snorted disbelievingly and eyed the beads of water dripping from her hair, darkened to black and smoothed against her head. She stopped just outside the dome of rainless air around him. "Put down the umbrella, I might be able to persuade you too."

"Well…" he said, a mischievous glint appearing in his eye. Knowing what was coming from far too many otherwise boring hours like this one wasted in banter, she cocked an eyebrow, daring him on. "If you just took off your coat now, and stayed in the rain, that could be _very_ persuasive…"

"Keep dreaming, Don."

"Don't worry, I will."

She sighed, shaking her head in pretend despair. "Tell you what, I have a better idea." She proffered what she was carrying. "You'll have to take the bag off. Coffee?"

"Thank you very much, Detective." He pulled the upturned plastic bag upwards, revealing the cardboard tray with two cardboard cups balanced on, and a paper bag which tantalisingly suggested food. He picked up both the cups, handing one back to her as she scrunched the tray into quarters.

"You're welcome," she said. "Now, if you're a good boy and don't complain any more, you can have a cookie." She shook the paper bag, now showing darker spots of damp.

"Funny. Just come under the umbrella, will you? You're making me feel soggy just lookin' at you."

They stood under the umbrella, watching the water-slick metal bodies of the slowly crawling cars, noontime headlamps refracted through the raindrops. The ambulance had finally been and gone, and all they were doing was supervising as the wreckage was hauled out of the way.

"Hey, you!" The angry shout came from behind them, and they both turned to look. A water-soaked man, swollen with indignation, was splashing towards them.

"Me?" Flack questioned.

"Yes, you, who do you think I mean?"

Flack looked at Angell, who put the bag of cookies in her pocket, lifted the cup of coffee out of his hand, pulled away the umbrella handle from him with her fingers, and pushed him out into the rain with her pointed glance. He stepped forward reluctantly.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"Damn right you can help me! You can help me by getting this sorry mess on these streets cleared up! I have an important meeting, d'you understand?"

Flack groaned inaudibly. "Sir, we're working as hard as we can at present…"

The man laughed with irritation. "No, you're standing there drinking coffee, and stuffing your face with cookies. _My_ hard-won tax dollars pay your salary, so why aren't you doing anything to damn well earn it?"

Flack had always held a sort of respect for men whose faces would turn red when they were angry, and this man was almost purple. He fleetingly considered whether he should later ask Hawkes for a list of all the conditions the man would be prone to, so that he could recite them the next time he was faced with this sort of confrontation.

But right now wasn't the time. With his best bland 'police' face, and voice, he asked, "What would you like me to do, then, sir?"

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Angell trying entirely unsuccessfully to stop herself from cracking up with laughter. A uniformed officer approached her and said something, then left quickly, probably sensing the radiating air of hostility.

Either the man was determined not to be calmed down, or he too had seen Angell's amusement. "I want your name, and the name of your supervisor. I'm going to make an official complaint about your attitude."

Knowing perfectly well that a complaint like this had all the chance of an ice cube in hell of being taken seriously, Flack pulled his cell out. "You can call him right now if you'd like to. Not much signal, I warn you."

"Are you taking me seriously?"

"Of course I am, sir." Despite his best efforts, he felt the corners of his mouth curl up into a smirk.

Infuriated, the man shoved Flack in the chest. He stumbled backwards a step, and dropped his cell, which submarined into a puddle, throwing up a splash of waves.

"Just get back in your car," he snapped, irritation fountaining up thorough his mind. "Otherwise I'm going to arrest you for assaulting an officer, and for destroying police property."

The man looked at his face, decided he was deadly serious, and complied. Flack glared at Angell, who approached him, still attempting to smother her humour in the face of his lack of it. She handed him back his rapidly cooling coffee. The cell, when he scooped it out of the water, wasn't working. He threw it back to the ground in disgust. Angell rolled her eyes and picked it up again, sliding it into her pocket. "They can fix that, you know."

"Whatever." He swigged the last of the coffee. "How much longer do we have to be stuck here?"

"Actually," she said, "That's the good news. Officer Andrews just spoke to me while you were entertaining that guy, said the scene's about cleared. We're not needed anymore."

The clouds didn't quite roll apart and send down a ray of sunshine, but Flack considered this to be pretty close. "Let's run, quick, before they change their minds. D'ya want a lift?"

"Sure."

They headed towards Flack's car. "If you don't mind, we'll swing past the crime scene I left," he said. "Just to see how Stell and the other two are gettin' on. I think Mac was worrying about them; there's no signal there."

"Sounds fine to me," she agreed.

Flack took the reverse of the route he'd driven before, avoiding the most crowded areas. The wipers swished on the windscreen, back and forth, back and forth. Water spayed up from beneath the tyres as gaps opened up between the cars.

He turned off from the main stream of traffic, drifting along a smaller tributary which gradually became deserted. "Where's the scene?" Angell asked, looking up from Flack's cell which she had taken to pieces, hoping to get the water out of it.

"In an empty building, just round a couple of corners," he told her.

They turned the corner. Drove past buildings whose blank eyes of windows stared at them expressionlessly.

They turned the next corner. The rain increased, teardrops hurling themselves down to splinter on the glass in front of them.

Flack jammed on the brakes, car juddering to an emergency stop. He opened the door, flung himself out, hoping somehow that the glass of the windows had distorted the picture, placed a false image to fool his eyes. He half-ran a few steps forwards, and stopped. Angell joined him, placing a trembling hand on the shattered remains of Stella's car windscreen, a block of concrete ripped and burrowed into the driver's seat.

They stared together at the destruction.

What was in front of him was just too big to comprehend. He shook his head, and kept shaking it, unaware. It was too big to do anything other than try to trivialise it with words, syllables shaping from his mouth out of breaths he didn't notice taking.

"This is really bad. This is really, really, fuckin' bad."


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: Thank you to everyone for your continued and detailed reviews! I really appreciate the time taken, and I love reading them. They're a great encouragement to take frequent breaks from revision to work on this! :)  
**

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The building was tangled and twisted into itself, a spider's web of beams and broken walls. Around and around it wound, knotting the flies it had captured within a skein of threads. Thick dust from shattered surfaces lay heavy in corners, still settling through the air to stick to everything, speeding up time as a layer of years was laid down over minutes.

One fly lay still, wrapped tightly. Pale skin that hadn't been able to hold onto its colour, tangled hair that twisted the fly tighter into the grasping web. No escape.

The metal and concrete which had trapped her greedily furled around her. Falling dust traced fingerprint whorls over her face, clinging to the drying moisture of her lips.

Another fly, elsewhere, stirred. Just enough at first to shake the strands of dust covering his clothes.

He struggled up to a confused consciousness.

There were pieces of – stuff – on him. Pieces of stuff pressing onto his chest. He struggled to make sense of what had just happened, his mind splintered into jigsaw pieces.

He had been checking the body. Stella had asked him to, to see if she had missed anything, and he remembered a ghost-echo of the pride he'd felt. She had gone to look for Hawkes, and Hawkes had gone to see where the man who'd shot Jude Allan had got in. And it was raining, and Flack had met them, and Danny had simultaneously laughed at him for having to go out and been irritated because he'd had some trace he'd wanted run.

And then – and then something had happened.

He was lying on his side with the _stuff_ pressing into and onto him, and he could feel it lying across his face. He moved his mind and he arms obeyed, pushing like a swimmer's. He opened his eyes as he pushed away the shattered pieces of a sheet of plasterboard lightly lying across his neck, bridging his head and body. It made a soft clatter against the hard floor as it slid away.

His first impression was that he was lying on a slope, head downwards. An illusionary force of gravity gave him momentary vertigo and he squeezed his eyes shut to squeeze it out. He _was_ tilted, he was sure, but to his side, not head downwards. He opened his eyes again, and saw this time that it was the ceiling that was at a crazy angle, and would be close enough to touch if he knelt up.

He wondered if there had been a bomb. Certainly everything had collapsed, although there was light coming in from somewhere. Boards, ceiling tiles, shards of plaster, lay like splintered bones around him. Time had somehow become meaningless and it could have been seconds, or minutes, that he'd lain there numbly, just looking. But he had to move, he decided. He didn't know where it had come from, but there only seemed to be room in his head for one thought at a time, so he obeyed it. He felt numb, as if he was supposed to be hurting but it hadn't quite travelled to his brain yet.

Carefully, afraid to make sudden movements that could bring what little remained of the room down around him, he used only his arms to carefully slide sheets of wreckage off his body. The methodical actions suppressed the panic which threatened to overwhelm him, crouching at the back of his mind, ready to pounce. _Don't look at it. Don't think about it._ It was an old game, that one, stroking around the thought with the fingers of his mind, like a tongue poking a loose tooth, drawn against his will to the lurching panic-pain, but always stopping just before the point at which it became too much to bear.

Free of the clutching wreckage at last he sat up, to fall back instantly with a gasping sob, his hands flying to his side, just under his ribcage, from where a red hot burst of pain spasmed through his body, and faded to a dull throb. His fingers felt the wetness of his own blood, and the tip of something sharp embedded in him. A shard of the building's ribs. A thorn. His fingers remained on the place, horrified by the thought of something alien inside him, the feeling of it, the _solidity_ of it, making him want to vomit. He dropped his head back down and lay still, breathing deeply, eyes closed. He didn't want to look down at himself.

He could still hear the rain, somewhere. Somewhere in the world not made of splinters, the world close by and yet so far away, with his clean safe lab in it, all the computers and photographs and neatness and circuit boards and analytical machines and dust-free surfaces. Colours. He opened his eyes, but there was no colours where he was. The rain was a grey sound, blending with the grey light and the dust.

He didn't want to move. He wanted to lie still, and wake up when everything was over.

Grey shapes clustered at the edges of his vision, sliding away as he turned his head. He felt the ghosts pass through him, shades of cold, soothing his eyelids closed again. His thoughts were moving slowly through November fog.

Keeping his eyes shut he rolled over slowly, back onto his unhurt side, trying to ignore the way he felt his skin stretch, tearing at the edges of the wound. It didn't hurt quite as much as it had at first – maybe he was becoming used to the background pain of it. He opened his eyes again, forming a list of options in his mind. He held any and all points he came up with in numerical order, imagining them typed out in black onto a white and clean and intact sheet of paper, adding more and more points, a simple list of his situation and details: the odd patterns formed on what used to be a floor; the jagged rip in the wall; his camera lying nearby, the wires of its guts spilling out of it, brightly coloured.

_That could have been me._

- - - - -

The clouds hung low over the city as the intensity of the rain increased. Slick with wetness, all the still-standing buildings were almost indistinguishable from each other. The volume of water on the streets was still rising, currents flowing downhill, washing litter down to clog the storm drains. Foil wrappers, plastic bags, cigarette packets; all floated and spun along like a fleet of childrens' boats.

Danny sat at his desk, bored. Still, he reminded himself, doing paperwork was far better than having to be out on a day like this. When he had last looked out of the window properly he had seen the cars clogging the streets under the lashing of the rain, and he didn't expect his colleagues back for some time. But somehow, Sid had managed to plant a small seed of worry into his mind earlier, and it nagged at him, threatening to germinate into something more. He was waiting for someone, anyone, to get in touch.

His extension line rang, and he pulled the phone from its cradle. "Messer."

"Hey, it's Lindsay."

"Linds? Where are ya?"

She sighed, a burst of static. "Stuck in the car. In a street."

He picked up a pen, flicking it between two fingers. "How fast's it moving?"

"It isn't. We've parked."

"So you're not going to be back anytime soon?" he asked.

"It doesn't look like it, no."

"Great. I'm going crazy here on my own." He began doodling on a scrap of paper, spirals that quickly tangled to a thicket of black ink.

"Well, Mac and I are stuck in a car for the foreseeable future. You have a whole building. Somehow, I think you have the better deal."

There was a pause over the line, during which Danny heard muffled voices, guessing that Lindsay had a hand over her cell's speaker.

"You still there?" she asked, after a few seconds had gone by.

"Course."

"Well, Mac says get back to work when we're done talking."

Danny chuckled. "Ok, ok, tell him I am. I'm just gonna grab a cup of coffee from the break room first. What's the other thing you need to tell me?"

"That's not fair. Stop gloa…" Her voice crackled down the line.

"And maybe a muffin too, a lovely chocolate muffin with chocolate chips in."

"Dan…y, sh… up. …eally." He strained to hear what she was saying.

"Linds, I'm losin' ya."

"Signal. Ba… We need you to …ne, Flack, … m…ng …"

"What?" He pressed the phone close against his ear. "Linds, I can't hear you. Something about Flack?"

"…anny…"

"Linds? Lindsay, are you hearing me?"

"St…"

"Say it again, I didn't catch it. Shout!"

The line buzzed and crackled, and was overridden by the dial tone. He muttered curses at the phone as he punched in her number.

"This cell is unavailable," the synthetic voice informed him.

The water rose slowly, islands forming.

- - - - -

Another unlocatable thought took root and Adam pushed himself, slowly and carefully, onto his hands and knees. His head nearly scraped the collapsed ceiling.

A small black spider scuttled across the floor, avoiding his fingers. He waited for it to leave, tracing its path with his eyes. It seemed unaffected by the collapse. He disconnected from the situation, wondering whether the insects were now planning an uprising. He wouldn't blame them if they did. Perhaps they'd make him their ambassador.

He shook his head, attempting to clear the murky pool of his thoughts. _You'll be hallucinating next. If you start seeing Shelob, you'll know you're in trouble._

Slowly, testing himself, he crawled forwards, stopping as he reached the blockade ahead of him. The jagged chaos repelled him, and he didn't dare touch it at first for fear that it was supporting a wall, a ceiling, which could fall on him, trap him for good in a mound of rubble. Buried alive, with only the shadows for company. And the spiders.

He squeezed his eyes shut again, his hand again drifting to the shard in his side, choosing pain to suffocate the panic. He swallowed, tasting the clinging dust which cloyed in his throat and mouth. He moved his tongue, sucking at the inside of his cheeks, filling his mouth with saliva, trying to spit out the clagging taste in his mouth. For the first time he tried his voice, and managed to croak. He cleared his throat, coughing, and tried again.

"Help!" Faint, but to the point, and it was a start. He opened his mouth again and stopped as another thought bit into him, black with venom. He had forgotten. He had forgotten about the others, and his selfishness appalled him.

"Stella!" he shouted, the sound he made barely louder than his first attempt but to him infinitely better, infinitely more important. "Hawkes! Stella!"

The faint vibrations of his voice tremoured outwards. The sounds tangled and stuck in the web. They didn't travel far.


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: Not too slow an update this time. I love hearing what people think, so thank you for everyone who's reviewed so far! I really enjoy reading them.**

* * *

The darkness around them was solid. It was far more than an absence of light; they were at the bottom of a pool of ink. Hawkes could almost feel it as a tangible pressure on his skin, the particles of it seeping into him through his pores.

He lay flat against the floor, one arm bent up behind him to cushion his head. Slowly he moved his other hand over his torso, analysing himself. At least two cracked ribs, he thought. At least, he hoped they were only cracked. His eyes were closed. He had already searched in vain for any speck of light, and now preferred being in his controlled darkness of closed eyelids, where there were no fixed certainties. Anything was possible if he didn't look for confirmation.

The man with him, he had decided, was no threat. At least not for now. He had sounded young, and afraid – quite possibly afraid of him after his uncharacteristic outburst of temper.

With nothing else to do, Hawkes just lay still and tried not to think. Thinking led him back to descending those steps. Thinking led to the remembrance of bullets aimed for him which had brought down the building. If his friends were dead (he could only bear to think of it as an 'if') then it would be on his shoulders. He should have retreated, called Stella for backup. There were endless possibilities of something different which could have happened if he had done something else.

He heard the other man move in the dark a little way away, heard a sudden hoarse gasp of pain escape his lips, quickly silenced.

The man had tried to kill him. Now he was injured. _Serve him right. Why should I care?_ But he knew the answer to that already – Hawkes was still a doctor, and this was another living human being. Another living human being in pain. Emotions conflicted within him, anger, hate, the ferocity of them surprising him, but sympathy too, and even pity. For a while he battled within himself, until he came to a decision at last. "You're hurt," he said, sitting up.

"I'm fine." The defensive reply came immediately.

Hawkes sighed, facing where he guessed the man's face was, although of course it would make no difference. "I'm a doctor. You don't sound fine. Let me see."

"No! I _said_, I'm fine. I don't want you looking at me!"

The temptation to leave him suffering was there, but only very weakly now that his medical training had asserted itself. There was no real contest. He tried to speak as reasonably as he could. "Why don't you want me to look at you? If you're trying to make sure that I can't identify you, I'd say it's a little late for that."

Silence. He continued undeterred. "Are you worried that I'll overpower you if I can see that you're hurt? What would I do? Sure, you've got both our guns, but you're not going to shoot me and I wouldn't shoot you even if I had them." It may have been the wrong thing to say in a hostage situation, he thought, but he'd never been trained in hostage situations, and it was doubtful anyway that this was a typical one.

He waited for a response, but there was still nothing. He lay back down again, his breath catching for a second as his injured ribs strained. He imagined the darkness as thick smoke, parting beneath him and moulding around the shape of his body.

"What's your name?" the man asked, a reluctant mutter, as if the question was being dragged out of him unwillingly.

"Sheldon Hawkes," he replied calmly. Now that he had made up his mind he was determined to follow through with it. "I get called just Hawkes. What's yours?"

There was another hesitant pause. "Olly."

"Olly what?"

"Olly Cook."

"Olly, I'm a doctor. Right now there's no one else here apart from us two, which makes you my patient. And as a doctor, I took the oath which says 'Do No Harm'. What you've done doesn't change that. So let me look at you, ok?"

Pause. Then, reluctantly – "Ok."

Hawkes pulled himself up again to sitting, and took his flashlight from his pocket. He clicked it on. Again the white beam leapt over the mess of concrete, girders, solid blocks. He spun it slowly to light on Olly. Darkness pressed in tight around the beam, repelled by it, but not for long.

Olly was young, about the same age as Jude Allan had been, with a shock of messy black hair and eyes which scrunched tight in his pale face as the light fell on him. A smeared line of drying blood ran down from his hairline.

"Alright, Olly, do you know where you're hurt?" Hawkes asked, with his most detached calm. Anger flooded into him again now that he had a face, a real person to blame, the strength of the feeling surprising him, but he ignored it. Right now he was a doctor, not a CSI, and certainly not a police officer.

"Shoulder," Olly muttered, looking away. Hawkes trained the flashlight on it.

"It's dislocated," he said, it being obvious without him having to touch it in the examination. "Have you done that before?"

Olly nodded. "Yeah. Fell out of a tree in Central Park when I was fourteen. My brother bet that I couldn't reach the top." The ghost of a smile drifted across his mouth.

"And did you?"

"Yes – but not for very long." He smiled properly at the memory.

Hawkes found himself echoing the smile and immediately wiped it off his face, even though it couldn't possibly be seen in the darkness. _This is a murderer, who may have killed your friends._ His voice left no trace of his momentary lapse as he set the torch down, propping up on some miscellaneous rubble. "This is going to hurt you. But you'll already know that."

"Yeah." Olly twisted his face up in anticipation, looking away.

Hawkes grabbed his patient's arm and twisted up, hearing Olly half shout, half scream at the same time as he felt under his hands the bone pop back into the socket. He put his hand on the younger man's other shoulder as he sobbed for breath, quickly calming. "How does that feel now?"

Olly breathed deeply several times. "Better. It doesn't hurt anymore, not nearly as much." An afterthought. "Thanks."

"Are you hurt anywhere else?" Hawkes picked up the flashlight again. "Let me see that cut on your head." He took the lack of argument to be permission. The cut ran into Olly's hair, but didn't appear to be dangerously deep.

"I'm fine now," Olly told him. He'd left the guns on the ground beside his body, he noticed. Clearly he wasn't experienced at holding a situation using them.

"I'm going to take the bullets out of the guns," Hawkes said, firmly, in a voice that was heavy with authority.

"You can't do that – " Olly began weakly.

"Yes I can, and I'm going to." Hawkes voice as he cut him off was a lot stronger than he felt. "What possible good is it going to do either of us to have two loaded guns sitting there? We've already established that you aren't going to shoot me, which makes them useless for threats." His mind was churning out scenarios and he already could think precisely of several in which the loaded weapons would be useful to Olly. A proper hostage situation, for example, when someone finally dug down into their basement prison. The same ideas obviously hadn't occurred yet to his companion, and he intended to make sure that it stayed that way.

He leaned forward, careful this time not to show outwardly the pain from his ribs. _No weakness just now._ Slowly he put out his hand and slid his own gun, which lay closest, towards him. It dragged over the concrete, catching and rattling against the hardness of the uneven floor. He picked it up, a dead-weight in his hand. Keeping it and his hand inside the cone of light he slid out the cartridge, emptied the chamber.

Click.

Click.

Olly was watching him carefully. He laid the empty weapon down close beside him.

Clack.

He took the bullet and the cartridge into one hand and tossed them over his shoulder without looking round. He didn't want either of them seeing where they landed.

He heard the noises they made as they tumbled against the concrete.

Clatter.

Clatter.

Clink.

Clink.

As he reached out for the second weapon he saw Olly's hand, dim at the edge of the light, spasm nervously as he resisted clenching it to a fist. But he didn't move. Not yet.

In the tension-stretched silence every metallic click seemed loud enough to echo, every second had far too much time contained within it. And then the second gun was empty too. He was tempted for a long moment to keep the cartridge in his pocket, just in case. Then he let it fly away from him, hearing the rattle as it collided with another hard surface, bounced, rattled, bounced, rattled, lay still.

He looked at Olly's clenched face, and Olly looked back at him, although he wouldn't be able to see anything through the light beam. He was aware that he was gripping the flashlight so tightly that his hand was hurting from the strain. Neither of them moved.

And then, improbably, the theme tune to _Star Wars_ began to play loudly. They both jerked, startled, and Olly made a noise of mortified comprehension and pulled a cell from the pocket of his jeans, quickly hitting a button. The tinny music stopped.

"Alarm clock," he said, beginning to laugh, the sound shaky from the after-effects of the now-vaporised tension.

"For what?" asked Hawkes.

Olly grinned, embarrassed. "Um. This girl, Alice, her shift starts now at this bar, and I was going to drop in…"

Hawkes very nearly succumbed to the laughter building up inside him, almost forgetting what Olly had done. Almost. He bit it back down again. "You didn't tell me you had a cell with you."

"It doesn't have any signal, so I didn't think it mattered."

Hawkes said nothing, clicking off the flashlight, and feeling the brief flicker of almost-companionship die with it.

Since there was nothing else to do he lay down again. This time his eyes wouldn't stay closed but continued searching for the light, the escape route, that he knew perfectly well didn't exist. Time treacled around him, unmeasured.

"Are they going to find us?" Olly asked finally, his voice quiet. The dark, it seemed, gave him back the courage to speak again.

_They have to find us, and soon. Otherwise we're both going to die down here. _"Of course they will," Hawkes told him, purposely letting his voice carry more confidence than he felt. Reassuring the younger man helped him reassure himself.

"How long?"

"How would I know? We just have to wait."

Olly now seemed eager to talk again. There was fear creeping back into his voice. _He's just a kid,_ Hawkes thought. _He's still afraid of the monsters in the dark._ He wished for the silence of the morgue, the bright lights and the absolute certainty of right and wrong as he passed judgement on those who would never speak up to correct him. Victim. Criminal. Good. Bad. Death was very simple, while real life was messy, and complicated.

Adam and Stella. He could judge them with certainty. They deserved to be safe, unhurt, but most of all, alive. He tried to picture them. They could be out by now. Surely a building couldn't fall down and go entirely unnoticed? Stella would be swearing furiously at the wreckage. It would probably move apart for her, and then they too would be able to escape.

But Olly was complicated. He was losing the ability to hate him. He _wanted_ to be able to hate him, to have someone to blame unconditionally for what had happened, but every time a brief conversation swelled up, that became harder.

_You should never speak ill of the dead. But at least they won't challenge your assumptions if you do._

"Can I turn on one of the flashlights?" Olly asked.

"No. We're saving the batteries." Hawkes was now firmly in charge, had been ever since the moment he had reached, unstopped, for the guns.

Olly was reluctant to give up. "I've got a lighter. We could make a fire? Then we could see _and_ keep warm."

Hawkes felt a jolt of inordinate irritation that Olly's mind was working too slowly for him. "Don't be so idiotic. If we light a fire, it'll use up the oxygen in here. We might only have a limited supply. We'll suffocate before anyone has a chance of finding us."

His voice had come out harsher than he had meant it to. There was a pause, during which he wondered if he should apologise. He didn't. He closed his eyes against the tendrils of black which he could feel stroking against them with infinitesimal pressure. No wonder that Olly wanted light to drive them away. He was on the brink of sympathising with him again. Just on the brink.

"Are we wasting the air by talking?" Olly asked, timidly.

More irritation. "Yes." Silence.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N: Well, I've officially left school now, which is very scary. Still another month of exams though, but I should be able to get chapters done slightly more regularly now. Continued thanks for all the reviews, and to everyone who's put this on alert too. I love hearing what you think. Thanks to lily moonlight, for discussion.**

* * *

The building creaked and groaned, shifting. Coiling tighter around its prey. Spun threads pulling taut around the flies trapped within it.

The corpse-cold fingers of the rain probed their way inside, now beginning to trickle downwards from what remained of the upper storeys, where they had spread into glassy pools reflecting the greys surrounding them. Insects scuttled downwards to escape.

"Stella!" Adam shouted again. He heard nothing in reply. He crawled closer to the barricade, developing an odd, lopsided kind of movement, which tore at his side as little as possible. "Stella!" he shouted into the wreckage, and turned his head, waiting, listening. He still didn't hear anything.

He tried to think what he could do, tried to rationalise it. Looking around, all he could think of was Trace. There was trace all over him, all over the scene. All the evidence he'd collected would be compromised. He'd spent so long collecting it, and been so careful, and Stella had been pleased with him, and now it was all gone. All of it.

There was blood on some of the pieces nearby, pieces of stuff he'd brushed past without noticing properly. He wondered if the floor where the body had bled out had buckled and ended up there, or if it was evidence which he had somehow missed earlier. It took several seconds to realise that it was from him. He tried to wipe the knowledge from his mind, still avoiding looking down to seeing how badly he was actually hurt. The footprints he'd made earlier were gone, too.

"Stella!" he shouted. He wasn't expecting an answer anymore, but it gave him something to do, something to wait for. As long as he expected her to answer, it might come true, and she might answer eventually. And if they were being looked for then someone might hear him, and it still felt better to be calling for Stella than it would to be shouting for help for himself.

- - - - -

She wasn't feeling. Was only slightly aware. There was endless radio static buzzing in her head, a white noise which reverberated through her body and she wanted to step out of her body to be rid of it, as the unfocusedness of it, the screaming of the fractured picture she was in, seemed to shriek and spasm through her bones and skin and synapses. There wasn't any room for proper thought. She hovered somewhere, somewhere between waking to pain and slipping into a deeper unconsciousness, where there would be nothing.

- - - - -

Adam had turned himself so that he was sitting against the wreckage, his back resting on it. With his arm on the uninjured side of his body, he found himself pulling at pieces of the stuff, easing them out, creating a small pile of miscellaneous rubble beside his leg.

He wondered what he was trying to achieve. He could bring everything down on top of him. Against his will, his fingers again crept to his side, retreating slick with redness, feeling the knot of pain tighten again, swallowing. Another spider picked its way delicately across the floor, or perhaps it was the same one, back for another look at him. He didn't care.

He laid his head back, closing his eyes against reality, feeling his pulse pound in his side. He could stay here, and wait to be found. Surely they wouldn't be long. Drowsiness stole up around him, a warm blanket of soft dark behind his eyelids, awareness of the world ebbing and flowing. Shifting tides of colour, feelings, pain. They began to drain away.

His body slumped, sliding down a few inches. It jerked him, the building's thorn twisting inside him. The renewed pain jolted through his mind like a shaft of lightning, instantly vaporising the grey clouds which had obscured it. His eyes had snapped open instantly and he held his breath, holding it tightly as the pain inside him slowly faded again to a level he could manage, his arms pushing him back up into his former position.

He didn't immediately start slipping away again, his mind suddenly firing towards him all the thoughts which had merely drifted aimlessly a few seconds or minutes ago. He couldn't tell how long. His watch had stopped, so time might as well have stopped too.

If he continued trying to get out he might bring what remained of the structure down on top of him. He might spend forever scratching the surface of a barrier that could be several metres thick, with a drop on the other side.

Or he could stay where he was, waiting for help that might never come, eventually succumbing to the shadowed ghosts seeping towards him, in shades of grey, threatening to engulf him.

The brief spike of mental activity faded away.

Echoes hovered in the air, all the voices the walls had ever heard and trapped within them now released out of the cracks. They whispered into his ears and at the same time deadened the sounds of the debris he still absently shifted, fingers scrabbling. The whispers sounded in his head.

It's safe just here…

You're hurt…

Coward…coward…

Can't do anything right…

Just close your eyes…

…what about Stella?...

…Stella…

He forced his eyes open again. He hadn't noticed them close. He coughed to clear his throat. "Adam Ross," he muttered. "You aren't seriously going to stay here, are you? C'mon, get moving."

He twisted himself around onto his knees, surveying where to start. Talking to himself, he realised, was a good strategy, keeping him from thinking too much. Thinking, at this point, was bad.

The shadows were watching him. He could see them out of the corners of his eyes. So he kept up a running commentary, sliding interchangeably between a normal speaking volume and a level which was only his mouth forming the shape of his words.

"Ok, that bit there will move. C'mon, slide it out like that. Like that." An intake of breath accompanying the jolt as it came free. "Just clear that stuff out of the way, there isn't that much of it." He scrabbled, rabbit-like. "And then this bit will slide that way – come _on_, Ross, for God's sake. You can do this. You'd – you'd _better_ do this."

Luck finally seemed to be on his side. He pulled away a block of the no-longer-wall and found a hollow passage, where a flat sheet of boarding – or wall, he had no idea what you called pieces of a structure once they ceased being pieces of structure and became merely _stuff_ – lay propped diagonally, the air beneath it a void. Eagerly he peered through it, and was rewarded by a glimpse of light on the far side.

He lay down. "Wriggle," he muttered. "It's not far." He pushed himself up with his arms. There were a few endless and hideous moments as he kept up a litany of swear words which would have made Danny proud, shoving himself along, pushing his way through a layer of dust and _stuff_ and pain, strands of dust and cobwebs on his face, and then he was in another space, another tank of air, where he lay gasping for breath, and then pushed himself up triumphantly, laughing in amazement that he'd actually escaped the cocoon of the original crime scene.

"Stella!" he shouted, hope again sounding in his voice to match the sudden buoying of his mood. He had got out of the room. He would continue to get out. So would she. So would Hawkes.

The stairway was ahead of him, folded like the bellows of an accordion. He crawled towards it, not wanting to risk his newfound optimism by trying to stand. Stella had gone down the stairs, he had heard her. Shutting his eyes in concentration, he tried to sort through his tangled memories. He didn't think that she had gone all the way down the stairs, hadn't heard her footsteps echo for as long as he had heard Hawkes's. So she was the closer of the two. He would find her, and then together they would be able to find Hawkes.

And because he needed to find Stella, he would be able to get down the stairs. It was all very simple. And when he got to her she would know what to do, because she always did, and then everything would be alright.

So he was not unduly surprised that he _was_ able to get to the floor below, sliding himself down step by slow step. For a building which had collapsed around him, this corner was relatively undamaged.

Then he was at the level below, and he knew Stella had to be on this floor, _had_ to be, because the stairs were sheared off below him, twisted concrete with strain lines showing, steel rods sticking out desolately, stretched and snapped. And as upstairs, this corridor started out easily passable but quickly clogged with tumbledown concrete.

"No time to waste, Adam," he said firmly. "Get on with it. Keep moving." He pulled more air into his lungs, calling out again. "Stella? Can you hear me?"

- - - - -

_Yes,_ she thought,_ I can hear you._ She could hear him, and she could hear the rain. She had been listening to its calming music for a while now, ever since she had realised properly that it was a noise which was outside of her head. She couldn't move, didn't seem to be able to open her eyes properly, even, but she could hear as each sound dripped into her mind and was oh-so-slowly processed and analysed by her brain.

- - - - -

"Stella!" He had finally steeled himself to glance down at his shirt, and now wished that he hadn't. There was a creeping stain of redness, which belonged inside him, not on his clothes. He hadn't folded back the edges of the tear in the fabric to see what lay beneath. Either way, it wasn't going to matter.

The corridor was a maze, but not completely nonnegotiable. He shifted what he could aside to make his passage easier and puzzled his way forward, a laboratory rat someone had let out of his cage. He managed a weak chuckle at the thought. That was him exactly. A lab rat who was trying to get back to his lab.

- - - - -

She waited, not that she had a choice. The amplitude of the white static modulated inside her, rising and falling. It was a road drill in her head, an un-tuned radio – an almost-sound and a discomfort shuddering through her acutely so that there was no room around the edges for conscious movement, hardly even conscious thought. Just the sounds, some real, some imagined.

- - - - -

He took the easiest way through. There was no question about trying anywhere else, about searching methodically. He was looking for a clue, anything. _You were pretending you were a CSI earlier, weren't you? Use your damn eyes. Mac's told you often enough that there's always something._ "Stella?"

He felt the floor tremble beneath his hands and knees. A shower of dust and small particles of grit tumbled down on him. He looked around nervously, almost sure that the walls had moved a few inches, slowly closing in on him. Trapping him.

Walls have ears, he'd been told. He tried to hold his breath so that they wouldn't hear him, picking his way forward as quietly as possible.

And there was his clue. The lid of Stella's kit, ripped off its hinges. He forced himself towards it and picked it up, not that it was of any use by itself. But he had to be close. He laid it down again, and clambered with difficulty over a spar, and found the scattered contents of the kit, one plastic bottle split open and the chemical it contained spread into a shallow puddle. He left a purple-pink trail through the previously clear liquid as he crawled through. "Stella?" _Can't be far now._

- - - - -

She heard him again. _I'm right here._ Forgetting that he couldn't hear what she was thinking. She heard his voice and the shuffling noises he made, noises sliding in and out of focus. She felt the cool touch of liquid pooling against her skin.

- - - - -

It was her hair he saw, webbed and tangled in the mass of debris. He scrambled towards her as fast as he could, not daring, anymore, to speak. He pushed away the beams which had formed a bridge over her head, but knowing as he reached her he'd never be able to uncover her from the portion of wall which wrapped itself over her lower body, enclosing her in a chrysalis of concrete. "Stell – Stella?" he stammered nervously, addressing her closed eyelids. He put out a shaking hand, held the palm over her slightly parted and colourless lips, pressed two fingers lightly against her neck.

"Stella, can you hear me? Please, you've gotta say something."

She was breathing. Her heart was beating.

One hand spread out towards him, lying alongside her face. He took it and squeezed it, taking deep breaths of relief. She was still alive. He hadn't been too late to find her.

But he didn't know what to do now. He had been clinging to the hope that once he found Stella she'd know what to do, and everything would be alright. He hadn't pictured her lying there injured. She looked badly injured. Hastily he began talking again, to Stella or to himself, he wasn't sure. Anything to fill up the silence which was mocking him. The walls clutched his words from his mouth.

"Stella, please wake up. I don't know what to do, Mac should be here, or, well, anyone would know what to do more I s'pose. But Mac's gonna kill me if I let anything happen to you, so please wake up, please be alright, 'k?"

He was blinking back tears, wiping the dust from his face. _Of course she's not alright, Ross, you idiot._ Not able to bear looking at her anymore, he watched the floor instead. There was water beginning to spread outwards. Droplets were sliding noiselessly into a slowly growing pool. A drowned fly floated in it.

He squeezed her hand again. And he felt a trembling pressure as Stella's cold fingers wrapped around his. His head snapped around to her, eyes widened in sudden hope, and hers were half open, looking back at him.

The walls held their breath, held all the breaths they'd stolen. They watched, and listened, and waited.


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N: So far, this wins my 'longest chapter' award. Thank you so much for all the wonderful reviews I've been receiving, I really love hearing what you think! Please feel free to continue :)**

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There had been near silence since Lindsay had finished calling Danny. Just the drumming of rain on metal, the rhythmic sound lulling both of them. Mac had his head tilted back against the seat-rest, his eyes closed, and Lindsay was watching the endless shifting pinstripes of the grey rain against the darker building wall, dimly visible through the glass on which droplets of her breath condensed. With her sleeve she again rubbed it clear, and returned to staring out.

Mac's eyes suddenly snapped open, the falling water in his head finally solidifying into a decisive thought. "We're walking," he announced.

Lindsay eyed the outside world with reluctance. "Why not just wait for the traffic to start up again?" Despite her earlier impatience at the enforced confinement, the inside warmth and dryness of the car now seemed much more desirable than leaving it.

"We're obviously not going to be moving from here for a while," Mac said. "We can walk to another street which isn't so clogged up, and get a taxi back to the lab."

"What about the evidence, though?"

"If we lock the doors it'll still be secure," Mac pointed out. He watched Lindsay play for time with amusement.

"We'll get wet," she said lamely, well aware that she had lost the argument before it had even started. Suddenly an actual objection occurred to her, quite separate to her personal aversion to leaving shelter in this weather. "Mac, no one'll know where we are. Neither of our cells are working anymore."

He paused in the act of pulling the door handle, taking a second to think about her point. But he was suddenly intensely restless, and the solution he wanted quickly came to him. "We might be able to walk into an area that's covered by one of our networks. It's not as if anyone'll come looking for us here."

"Ok," she said, hesitantly, still slightly unconvinced by his logic. What if someone _did_ come looking for them? But she knew by now what her boss looked like when he wasn't about to be gainsaid, and right now it was clearly written into the anxious lines on his face.

Mac opened the door and climbed out into the rain, buttoning his coat and turning up the collar as he did so. Lindsay emerged more slowly from the other side, and he slammed his door shut and locked it. She joined him, one hand shielding her face. "Which way?" she asked. "Forwards or backwards?"

He glanced around. "Sideways. We want a clearer street. Let's head the way we were going for the rest of this block and turn off at the first chance we get." He moved off without waiting for an answer, and she followed. Not that she really had a choice.

Mac strode ahead, the rain flattening his hair against his skull. He absently glanced at the metallic colours of the cars in the queue as he passed, separated from them by the falling grey rain-curtains. He checked the display on his cell without slowing his pace, squinting as pixels in the middle of words were magnified by the domes of water spattering onto the screen. However he looked at it, though, the stamped letters still spelled out 'No Signal'.

An alley provided a short-cut and he took it, noting Lindsay still following him obediently. No sidewalk here; puddles spread into lakes which splashed up around the soles of his shoes as he placed his feet. Water soaked up past his ankles from his hems. A broken gutter torrented a waterfall which arched down to the plunge-pool it was creating beneath it. Eyeless walls rose up on either side of him, a thin seam of a grey sky visible high up.

The lakes were spreading to an ocean, clouds opening to pour down their contents. He waited for Lindsay to come alongside him as she called his name.

She was picking her way more carefully than he was, aware that the heels on her shoes put her at risk when she couldn't see the ground she was walking over. Ever cautious, visions plagued her of a grating lurking beneath the water catching her, pulling her over, her ankle snapping. "Mac, wait up!" she called again, not wishing to be left behind and lost in this weather. The fact that no one, probably not even Mac, knew exactly where they were, was still worrying her. She had always been one for following rules, never wishing to bring attention on herself by breaking or crossing them. She had learned to dread too much attention.

Finally she caught up with Mac. He appeared entirely unconcerned by the rain which had already drenched him. She was hating the feeling of the cold damp spreading through her shirt, unseen beneath her coat. The fabric was tacky against her skin, clinging to her and then unsticking as she moved. She plucked at her collar, prying it from its clammy grip around her throat.

"Do you know where we're headed?" she questioned.

Mac glanced up at the sky. "North-West."

"That wasn't what I meant."

He didn't answer, mostly because he didn't know himself exactly the answer was. It was just a feeling, a feeling that he couldn't just sit and wait in the car, because there were things to be _doing_. So he shrugged, reading the tell-tale signs of slight irritation on Lindsay's face, which she was valiantly trying to hide.

"Mac!" she screamed suddenly.

He looked at her, which was the wrong direction as she pushed him hard towards the alley wall. He half jumped as she did, the world a confused blend of greys and brick brown, tripping so that the bricks caught him from falling all the way, their rigid punch against his arm as the roaring red sports car raced past uncaring, sprays of water fanning up and out from its tyres as he slipped to his knee, rough bricks supporting the skin on his hand but uncaring about the rest of him, scraping it away.

The car had already whizzed far past as he angrily struggled back to his feet, the licence plate an indistinct blur. _Good luck to it in the traffic jam it's heading into._ "Lindsay?" he asked.

She had also ended up on the floor. He put out a hand and pulled her up. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she reassured him. "Just completely soaked now." She shivered.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You were right. We probably should have stayed in the car."

"I'm going to tell Stella that this is all your fault."

He grinned wryly, but whatever he was about to say in reply was cut off as her cell rang, finally having found a trace of signal. She answered it immediatly, and he listened to the one-sided conversation.

"Monroe." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Flack? I can't hear you properly."

Pause. "No, louder. Flack?"

Another pause. "What's that? Something about Stella?"

Mac watched Lindsay as she clutched the cell, foreboding building up inside him. She was almost shouting in an effort to pass what she was saying along the line. "What? What's happened?" Her face was screwed up in concentration, as though that would help her hear better. She took the cell from her ear and frowned at the screen, her voice betraying annoyance – and worry. "Damn. It cut out again."

"What did he say?" Mac asked urgently.

Lindsay shook her head. "Something about Stella, I think. I couldn't make much of it out. But – he sounded really frantic. I think he said 'scene'. I – I don't know for sure."

Stella. Scene. Something which had made Flack sound frantic. Stella… "You didn't hear anything else?"

She shrank back under his intensity. "No, just that. Mac…"

His head was already spinning under the weight of hundreds of panic-induced possibilities. He knew where Stella's scene was, he had to get there as soon as possible.

She saw the expression on his face and correctly interpreted it. "You want to check she's ok, don't you?"

"Yes. When we get to the next street, we'll take a taxi there instead of the lab." His voice brooked no argument. The worry in his eyes was colder than the rain. She nodded, agreeing with him and knowing he wasn't going to waste time in talk, and fell in step again, slightly behind him.

Stella. He picked up his pace, trudging through the shallow ocean. The rain-rippled water surged back as he lifted each foot, leaving no trace of his passage. The grey curtains of rain fell between him and all the other souls in the city.

- - - - -

"Stella? It's Adam. Can you hear me?" He squeezed her hand again, excitement and trepidation making his voice tremor.

For a moment she didn't move, and then her lips parted and a breath of air sighed from her mouth, forming a whisper. "Yeah."

He didn't know what he should say. He didn't know what he was supposed to be doing. He tried to think back to when he had last been around someone who was injured, but that had been in the warehouse with Danny, and Danny had taken charge then and told him what to do. Now the initiative was with him. He looked round at the eyeless tangle of beams and blocks, as if they would help him.

"It's ok," he said, awkwardly. "S'gonna be ok." _I hope,_ he silently added. The shadows were still there, indistinct shapes formed from grey fog. He imagined them raising their eyebrows scornfully (did ghosts _have_ eyebrows?) at his forced and false optimism.

Her eyes closed, and then opened again, opened properly. But they frightened him, because the spark that had always burned in her whenever he'd looked at her, the one that flared up when she shouted at a suspect, burst out in fireworks in her arguments with Mac, wasn't there. This wasn't how she was meant to be. Stella was supposed to be unbreakable. She was supposed to be the one who always knew what to do.

But instead she was lying there, helpless and looking so, so broken, dust trapped in the tangle of her hair. She blinked again. "Adam?"

"Yeah," he said, glad that there could be no wrong answer, to this at least. "I'm here." His elbow brushed against his side and he jerked in sudden pain, hoping she wouldn't notice.

She lay still and watched the blurred outline of a figure gradually resolve itself into him, wavering as it did so, as if they were at the bottom of the sea, which would also explain the crushing pressure she felt on her chest. His anxious face swam into focus. His mouth moved again and the shifting syllables rolled towards her, forming a hurried flow of words. "Are you ok? I mean, no, you obviously aren't ok, I mean, sorry, I shouldn't say something like that, but…"

She struggled to catch all of his flood of speech, but managed a smile as he cut himself off, chewing his lower lip. "Slow – down."

"Sorry." He had released her hand, and his fingers were now jittering around his shirt collar, twisting the material. He wanted to ask her what he should do, what he should say, but bit the words down before they could leave his mouth. "Are – are you hurting?"

She smiled again at his clumsiness, feeling herself rising fast to full awareness now that there was a reason to do so, and wondered how to answer. Certainly there was pain, pain from everywhere, feeling crushed. But now she could also see the desperation in his eyes, the _need_ for her not to be hurting, because he wouldn't be able to do anything about it. So she avoided the question. "What happened?"

He shook his head, hopelessly. "I don't know. Everything just – collapsed."

She blinked, and focused on what was behind Adam. It hadn't occurred to her to do so before. Everything was the wrong shape. The walls were tangled up with the ceiling and floor, a knot that was tied tight around them. Nothing made sense. "I thought – I thought you were upstairs?" Maybe she'd forgotten. She wouldn't be surprised if she had. Everything was torn to shreds, including her recent memories.

The faintest flicker of pride crept into his face and voice. "I was. I came to find you."

He was aware of the pride and immediately felt ashamed of it. But her smile was warm, and her eyes were beginning to come back to life again. "Thank you," she said, sounding sincere. "I'm – I'm glad you did." He smiled timidly back.

He felt as if he was wasting time, but still had no idea of what he was supposed to be doing. He looked more closely at what was trapping her, at the concrete lying over her, coiling around her like a fern-frond furling back into itself. It was crushing into her chest. And he couldn't to do anything about it. _You're useless, Ross. _It was far too large and heavy for him to be able to lift, even if he hadn't been hurt.

Another spider scuttled over the top of it, pausing to stare at them both through its many eyes. _Go away, spider. Leave her alone. She doesn't like you._ Someone had told him that she hated them. He couldn't remember who. Usually he could always remember who told him what, but any significance to that thought scurried away into hiding before he could chase it. He put out a hand and gently swept the spider away. It was swallowed up by the shadows.

Turning back to her, he found that her eyes had closed again. "Stella?" he asked, hesitantly.

She opened her eyes, turning her head this time to face him properly. Her thoughts were clearing all the time, cobwebs being blown away as she forced herself to alertness. Suddenly she was able to interpret his awkward position, his shallow breathing. "Adam, you're hurt." She stared in alarm at the damp red stain on his dust-covered shirt.

"It – it's fine," he reassured her hastily. In the confusion caused by her concern he grabbed the first topic change he could think of, not realising until it was already too late that it was the one he'd previously resisted voicing. "Stella, what should I _do_?"

She tried to lift herself up for the first time. His eyes widened as he realised what she couldn't have realised, what she couldn't see. "No!" He reached out to try to push her back, but too late as she jammed her already crushed torso against the concrete she hadn't been able to see folded over her. She fell backwards immediately, trying to cough and gasp with pain, but there wasn't even enough space for her lungs to expand properly. Horrified, he lunged forward, ignoring his own pain as he moved, and caught hold of her shoulder. "Stella – oh God, Stella, I should have stopped you, don't move – oh God – it'll be alright, it'll be alright Stell, just stay still, it'll be ok, Stella, stay still – "

Her panicked gasping for air continued as she teetered on the edge of starting to hyperventilate. _Stop babbling, Ross, you idiot, you're making everything worse._ All he could do was be there, and he had no idea whether that would be enough to help her. "It's ok," he said again, this time forcing his voice slower. "It's ok. You're going to be fine."

He wished that he could believe it too.

He wished that he was someone else, somewhere else. Anywhere but here, in this situation. All the words he wanted to say, all the unconnected thoughts his panicked brain was spraying out hung heavy in the air. He took a breath, and breathed in particles of dust which caught in his mouth, tasting of years of old memories.

Slowly she calmed. Her eyes opened and looked at him, but they were duller again. He stared at her, wide eyed, and her face creased into a slight smile.

"Don't – look so worried," she managed. Her face was pale, greyish, the colour drawn away from her by the building. Colour was slowly seeping out of him, too, although he still refused to acknowledge it.

"Ok," he agreed readily, with no idea how to go about not worrying. Still no idea about doing anything, come to think of it. She read his face correctly and laughed, the sound hardly indistinguishable from a sob of pain. But then, the intake of air to produce the laugh had certainly been painful enough. "Please don't do that," he begged. "It's hurting you."

She wanted to say that it didn't really make any difference, that since she'd tried to move she felt as if she was slowly being run over by a steamroller, but couldn't seem to find the words for it. And Adam looked as if he already knew, but wouldn't be able to bear hearing it. So she tried to think of something else to say while she watched the broken beams of the ceiling tune in and out of focus above her. She could still hear the rain faintly. It was unceasing. Maybe it would never stop, and the whole world would fill with water. Then she could simply float free of here, and there would be no more pain.

"Stella?"

Adam was talking to her again. It took her a few seconds to manage to make a sound. "Yeah?"

He looked relieved. Maybe she had been watching the twisting wreckage for longer than she'd realised. "How – how do you feel?"

She thought about it. "Cold," she said. It was true. She felt no heat at all.

Adam saw her eyes falling closed again. He had heard, or maybe read, or seen in films, that you should keep injured people talking. But then he had also read or seen people saying 'Don't try to talk', and he didn't know which one applied to the situation now. All he knew was that he felt exhausted, and cold, and afraid. For both of them, but especially Stella. He turned himself around so that he was alongside her, and leant himself back onto a pile of rubble. The pool of water was still spreading, expanding towards them. He shut his eyes so that he wouldn't have to watch.

"I'm scared," he whispered. He hadn't meant to say it.

She half-opened her eyes, and reached out her free hand, and found his. "It's ok," she whispered back. "We'll be fine." His skin was almost as cold as hers.

They held on to each other.


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N: Slightly later than intended, I'm afraid. Thank you very much to everyone who's been reviewing, I really appreciate it, and love reading what you think! Please do feel free to add more :)**

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The sky was crying.

"Did she get the message?" Angell asked.

Flack nodded, then shrugged, then nodded again. "Yes – maybe. I'm not sure. Hope so."

Both of their voices were quiet. Neither of them had yet dared to move towards what was now a demolition site. A demolished site. Maybe less than two or three minutes since they had been stunned to immobility by the scene before them, but, at least to Flack, it felt like years. A whole era. There had been 'before', and now they were looking at 'after'. After what, though? Too many possibilities. He didn't chase the thought.

Angell was talking, sounds falling with the water. He tore his eyes away from the cratered walls, and focused on her. "Say again."

"Was it my cell or Lindsay's which lost the signal?"

"I don't know." She put out a hand for it and he passed it to her, thoughts turning numbly to the useless pieces of his own. Just another thing that was broken. He ran his hands over his eyes, kneading them with his knuckles in the hope that the view would be different when he next looked. "What the hell _happened_ here?"

She was equally shocked. "Well, the building's come down." Rain trickled down both their pale faces.

"Yeah, I get that. Shit. Stell… Hawkes… Adam… they were in there. I shouldn't have left them." He took a deep breath. "Jesus. I shouldn't have left them. It's my _job_ to stay."

Angel put a hand on his arm. He could feel the pressure through the layers of wet fabric. "You couldn't have know, Don, it's not your fault. You'd have been trapped in there too. You couldn't have done anything."

Flack shook his head, still trying to take it in. There was something wrong with what Angell was saying, but he didn't have the time to think it over. Didn't have time to point out that actually it most likely _was_ his fault. _It's your call, goddamit. Do somethin'. Everythin' else'll keep._ "We need to call in rescue. Take your cell, go and drive until you get a signal, or until you find a landline you can use."

She nodded, accepting his assumed leadership without question. "What about you?"

"I'm stayin' here. They might – if I shout they might hear me and be able to get out. Or I might be able to hear them." His face pleaded with her not to correct him.

"I hope so." They both knew how unlikely his words were, but there was hope as long as they both pretended to believe it.

"Leave the first-aid kit," he said, an afterthought, as she reached for the door handle. She took it from the trunk without a word and laid it in the lee of Stella's car.

As the engine started he approached the wreckage again. There was a layer of sodden dust, not quite mud, lying over everything. On flat surfaces the water had cut patterns of stripples as it trailed down, meandering along its unstoppable course. The sheer _enormity_ of it all rose up at him, sticking in his throat. _Where the hell am I meant to start?_

"Stella!" he shouted, feeling the smallness of his voice as the rain soaked it up. "Hawkes! Ross!" He wasn't used to feeling helpless. Where the hell was the door, even? How the _hell_ was he intending to do this?

- - - - -

The silence of words unspoken was stretched out between them. The darkness was a lonely place.

Hawkes could hear Olly moving around, pieces of the debris clattering and scraping as he shifted them. He had been doing it for a while, and Hawkes wondered what he was trying to achieve. Trying to dig a way out, maybe? He was finding it harder to care. At least the sounds weren't coming from the direction in which he'd thrown the bullets.

After a while they stopped. He waited, sure that Olly would say something soon. It seemed to be in his nature not to be comfortable in silence. In the meantime, he was trying to calculate how much air remained, how long they had been down here for. It was a small space. He could feel his breaths instinctively becoming deeper the longer he lay there, needing to draw in more oxygen. He was tired.

"Hawkes?" Olly was hesitant.

He waited a second before answering. "What?"

"Are we going to get out in time?"

"I didn't know the answer to that when you asked before, and I still don't."

"What do you _think_, though?"

Hawkes heard the tremor in Olly's voice. It broke through the cold resolve he'd gathered round him. He didn't want to be in this situation. But he was. He'd chosen to take charge and, by doing so, had made himself responsible for the both of them. "Olly, how old are you?" he asked.

"Um, nineteen."

_Damn._ He really was just a kid. "You look older." Or maybe he'd just wanted him to look older, and his eyes had been only too happy to oblige him in the beam of the flashlight. This new knowledge weighed down on him, the dark becoming heavier around him.

"Hawkes? What do you think?" Olly's voice had become more anxious, probably because of his previous evasion. He was still trying to make up his mind what to say.

"I think they'll find us," he said, finally and firmly.

"Really?" Olly sounded unconvinced.

"Yes. We're both going to get out." He put as much conviction as he could muster into the reply, telling himself that if he was wrong, he wasn't going to be called out on it.

He let the separation of silence fall again between them. Unmarked, the time stretched out like tar, and they were the poor flies trapped in the blackness of it.

The tapping of a dusty rhythm came from wherever Olly was. Hawkes found his thoughts running in time to it, and then his breathing too.

Olly began to hum, under his breath at first, volume steadily increasing. Hawkes didn't know the song, and waited until it was clear that he was probably not going to stop of his own accord. "Olly, shut up."

"Sorry." Silence, then more impatient clattering of stone on stone. "Um, Hawkes?"

"What?"

The pause was long enough for him to wonder if Olly had changed his mind about speaking. But at last he spoke up, hesitantly.

"Hawkes – what'll happen to me?"

"How do you mean?"

"I mean if – after we get out."

It was the question which Hawkes had, for a while now, been trying not to think about. He wasn't sure at present quite how much he liked the answer. His own fault, of course, for talking to him in the first place. _Empathy._ A required trait for a good doctor, a superfluous one for a good police officer. None of the others would have made that mistake.

Olly continued, stumbling over his words. "I mean – Jude – and, well, everything…" He trailed off, to a whisper. "I don't want to go to prison."

Hawkes sat up again with a groan, and turned on his flashlight. Olly's dark eyes were wide as he froze like a rabbit in the white beam, his arms wrapped around his knees. "It's a bit late for that."

Olly nodded miserably. "I know."

About to click the flashlight out, Hawkes stopped. He laid it down so that it shone between them, illuminating nothing in particular, but there, drawing his eyes towards it. "You did shoot Allan, then?"

"I didn't mean to. I didn't want to." He waited for a response, but Hawkes said nothing, wanting and not wanting to hear what he had to say. "I – I was stupid. Jude was older than me, he had this gang of guys who all hung out round my way, you know? And he let me start tagging on with them. It was really cool, Jude was really cool…"

"What happened?"

"Everyone has to be initiated, and he said I could be, so I met him here earlier, upstairs, and – and he had a gun, and he said… he said…"

"He said what?"

Olly's voice was strained, and shaking, with the suggestion of tears. "He said that – he said that if I thought he was seriously going to let a baby like me into his gang, I deserved whatever was coming to me. And then he said that all he was after was a way into the jewellery store where my dad works, after hours, without setting off the alarms. And that if I refused, he'd shoot me. He said that the building would be knocked down in a few hours, so no one would ever know what had happened."

In spite of himself, Hawkes was almost pitying Olly. _Just a kid._ "So what happened?"

"I could see he wasn't joking, and we were standing really close, so I tried to get the gun off him, and we were fighting, and it went off, and – and he was lying there, dead. Like properly dead, bleeding and everything. I _killed_ him." There was shock in his voice. "I didn't mean to kill him! But I was going to just run away, I got down the stairs and then the front door opened, down in the basement was the only place that I could think of to hide."

Hawkes interrupted. "It was the workmen, carrying out final checks. They were the ones who found Jude."

"I was scared. I mean, I _killed_ someone. And I didn't know it was workmen, I thought it was Jude's gang, come to find me." His voice dipped to a reluctant mutter. "When you came down the steps, I thought you were one of them."

"I said I was NYPD." The pity was draining away now, as fast as it had arrived. He was remembering the bullets, whizzing past him, each one carrying with it its tiny promise of death. And what had happened after. All because of the kid crouching a few feet away.

"I thought you were lying. I didn't think you really were the police. I just… I just panicked." He waited for a response, but none came. "I'm going to go to prison, aren't I?"

"Yes, you are." Hawkes's voice was hard. "You didn't _think_, did you? Not once. My friends – " He stopped, not able to bear finishing the sentence. Once again he clicked off the flashlight, plunging them back into darkness.

"I'm sorry," Olly said desperately. "I'm sorry. I really am."

A memory came, with all the vividness of a photograph, colours strong against the black background before his eyes. Stella bursting in through the doorway, out of the rain, laughing, the bright flare of her spirit dancing in her eyes and untroubled by the water droplets which dripped from her soaked hair, falling like tears. And Adam standing nearby, a smile at a joke not yet faded from his face. Both alive, both unhurt. And now…

Anger burned, as if a piece of Stella's fire had singed its way down through the ceiling and into him. He held the anger close, feeding its blaze, letting it burn away the thoughts he didn't want to be thinking. "I'm glad you're sorry. You should be. But do you really think it can, even slightly, make up for what you've caused?"

A whisper. "No."

"Well done. Correct answer."

In the blackness, the loudest noise was their breathing. Each breath used up exactly one lungful of air.

- - - - -

"Stella! Hawkes! Anyone hear me?"

Flack was inside the building now, had climbed in through a window that was now an empty space on the side that seemed most intact. Or the only side which seemed, at ground level, to have any semblance of intactness at all.

_It's only junk everywhere. Keep movin'._

He was breathing too fast, and aware of it, and angry at himself because of it. He should be focusing on finding those who needed finding, not his own fears. But the jaggedly sheared-off shapes struck chords in his memory, notes in a dark key, seeming all the worse as he hadn't seen them properly the first time around, the last time he had been in a building like this one. Then there'd only been the blurring of semi-conscious sight which had mostly been filled with Mac's face, but which had also let in the nightmarish destruction, the jagged edges, a mouthful of teeth poised and ready to clamp down on him, to finish him off after the first bite they'd already taken into his flesh. _This is not the time. Focus._

It had taken a while to break through the barrier wall of the empty room he had climbed into, and now he was in what he supposed was the hall. More than one direction he could go. He chose one at random. His heavy tread set off vibrations, and he kept glancing round cautiously, not knowing if he was likely to bring more of the structure down on top of him. _Think of a one-liner to deal with _that_, why don't ya?_

His voice was hoarse now from shouting, and he still hadn't heard a single noise that even his desperate mind could attribute as a reply. The sounds he made drifted upwards and away from his hearing, resonant echoes reverberating through the waiting air.

Stella… ell… la… la… stell... ell… ella…

Why did he have the feeling that the walls were listening to him, laughing at him? _Maybe because you're losin' your mind._

Time passed, minutes adding up. He was still picking his way through, roughly hauling planks out of the way, when he heard the faint hoot of a car horn, and he scrambled back the way he'd come, and out into the beating of the relentless rain once more, in time to see Mac open the passenger door of Angell's car while the wheels were still turning and step to the ground before the engine was silenced. His face was grimmer and more haunted than Flack had ever seen him, and pale, tracked with raindrops down its contours.

For long, wasted seconds of time, all Mac could do was stare. He'd been warned what to expect by Angell, during the frenetic drive which still had been nowhere near fast enough, after she had commandeered a phone line in a small store to call rescue just before spotting and picking up him and Lindsay, but a warning was nothing compared to the reality which faced him.

"Have you found anything?" Angell asked tersely from behind him.

Flack shook his head. "I've been inside. The ground level's all choked up."

Lindsay was standing beside him now, hand to her mouth.

Mac finally found his voice and spoke, directly to Flack. "What happened?"

"I still don't know. It looks as if the explosives might've been detonated."

"What explosives?" His voice was steel, un-rusted by the water it cut through.

Flack's voice was heavy. "This building was scheduled for demolition this afternoon. It was postponed because of the body. Probably why no one called it in; everyone was expectin' it to happen."

Mac's voice sharpened. "And you left them here? You just _left_ them?"

"Mac, I got called to another incident, it wasn't as if I just _decided_ to leave them!" He became instinctively defensive, justifying himself in the face of Mac's wrath despite his earlier words to Angell.

Both their voices were rising rapidly now, thunderclaps of anger.

"You're supposed to stay with them!"

"It wasn't as if I had a choice! I didn't know anything would happen!"

"Your job is to prevent anything happening! That's what you were on the scene for!"

"I couldn't've…"

"You don't know _WHAT_ happened, Flack! How the _HELL_ do you know whether you could have stopped it or not?!"

With furious satisfaction Mac saw Flack open his mouth and stop, temporarily lost for words. It was enough time for Angell to step into the breach.

"Argue later," she said angrily. "For now, isn't it more important that we actually find them?"

She was right, of course she was right, and the rain drummed its approval on the ground around his feet, splashing into puddles forming in the mud. "How did you get inside?" she continued, addressing Flack, authority crackling from her. "Take Mac with you, and show him. Rescue don't know when they'll be here, they've been called to incidents everywhere, and you know how bad the traffic is today. Soon as they can, they said."

"This way," Flack said brusquely, and Mac immediately followed him, both of their steps eating up the ground beneath them as they strode. "Try round the other side, see if there's another way in," he called back to Angell and Lindsay. She acknowledged him with a nod, but had already started moving of her own accord.

Mac followed him in through the window, and they were inside. In the wreckage, which he hardly spared a glance. Whatever it looked like, it wasn't important. All his drive was for finding Stella. That was all that mattered for him right now. "Where in the building?" he asked.

"Third floor," Flack replied curtly. "We'd better split up, try and find a stairwell or something. There must be a way through somewhere." Anger still simmered in both their eyes, barely concealed beneath the surface.

Mac nodded, heading in his chosen direction, already calling urgently, wasting no more time.

How much time was left?

"Stella! Stella, answer me!"

- - - - -

She heard his voice, faint and far below. She had been waiting to hear it, hoping for it. "Adam," she whispered. "Listen."

She half-opened her eyes to the grey blur of shapes. The grey sound of the rain, and the stronger sound of him calling. The faint whispered echoes of it ghosted through the empty spaces surrounding her. "It's going to be ok. Mac's here, he'll find us."

Adam's hand was cold in hers, and she squeezed it, feeling the faint pressure of his fingers in reply. But he didn't make a sound as the cold grey film of water crept closer towards them across the dusty floor.

Another little insect was caught alongside the drowned fly. It threw out insignificant ripples as it struggled, and soon was still.

A redness began to diffuse through the advancing grey water. Neither of them noticed.


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N: I've been a bit behind on updates, sorry about that, I've been really busy lately. Thank you very much as always to everyone reviewing, and also everyone putting this story on alerts or favourites, I really do appreciate your time, and do feel free to continue! **

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Footsteps. A soft noise, the dust rising up as it was disturbed, swirling around the black leather of the shoes in the up-draft. The steps were hurried, their owner having no time to spare. He was looking for a way up, a way to get higher, a way he hadn't found yet, but the building blocked him, drawing tight its mesh in corridors, disorientating him by the loss of the straight lines. He hoped that Mac was having better luck.

Maybe, if he had listened closely, he would have been able to tell that there was a hollow space below him. But probably not.

Another dead end. He kicked out in anger and frustration, sending a cube of concrete skidding over the floor to slam into where the ceiling and walls closed in, causing a scattering of grit to skitter down. He shouted out, mixing names of friends with curses, pleas, a last-resort prayer of desperation.

The walls were silent. He turned away, heading in another direction.

- - - - -

"Can you hear that?"

Olly's voice was an echo, sounding almost as if it was coming from above.

"Can I hear what?" Hawkes asked tightly. He wasn't in the mood for talking anymore. "There isn't anything."

"No, no, there is…" Olly's voice was rising fast in excitement. "Come over here – listen!"

Hawkes sighed, and crawled towards where the voice was coming from. Sharp, hard objects pressed into his shins and the palms of his hands, and there were larger blocks of rubble which he pushed out of his way. "Where are you?" he asked. His own voice hovered through the empty space.

"Over here."

Wondering why he hadn't thought of it before, Hawkes felt in his pocket for the flashlight – and remembered that he hadn't picked it up from the floor next to where he'd been sitting. It was probably gone for good, now. He certainly wasn't going to attempt to go back and find it by touch. "Didn't you have a flashlight, earlier?" he asked.

"Yes, I did, I do, but I'm trying to see a way out." He was almost tripping over his own words in urgency, for a second calling memories of Adam to mind. "Over here, you have to climb up, there's a pile…"

"Are you serious that you can hear something?"

"I think – I thought I could. I want to see if you can too. Please?"

Hawkes felt the flat floor disappear beneath his hand and be replaced with a sloping mass of angular blocks. With a groan of pain drawn out of him from his injured ribs he began to pull himself up. The surfaces shifted under him, and he felt sharp corners slice into the skin on his hands and forearms as he slipped and grabbed for balance. Gravity had changed in the blackness, becoming stronger, or maybe the blackness was holding onto him, not wanting him to escape. There was no real sense of the angle he was climbing, or how far he climbed.

And then, after what felt like an age, but was probably only a minute or so, what he touched was faintly warm fabric, and moved as his hand briefly fell on it. "Olly, that you?"

"Yeah. Move up a bit, listen. Be careful, 'cos the ceiling's right there, I've already hit my head on it."

Hawkes shuffled forwards, one hand feeling around him, scraping his knuckles against the rough ceiling as it bent down within reach of his arm. In front of him he found a barrier. This was the closest point to the outside world. He listened, straining his ears, willing himself to hear a sound, any sound, that could be coming from above, but could only hear their breathing, and the small clattering of stones as Olly fidgeted beside him. "There's nothing."

"There was." Olly's voice was heavy with disappointment. "I swear, I heard something just a minute ago." He was pleading to be believed.

"What did it sound like?"

"I don't know – maybe something being moved, or someone shouting."

"Well then, why didn't you make a noise, try and attract attention?" Hawkes snapped, frustration that perhaps their chance of rescue had already come and gone sharpening his voice.

"I don't know…" Olly trailed off, contritely. "I didn't think…"

"That seems to be a recurring trend." A pause, and then, curiosity getting the better of him – "Why did you climb up here in the first place?"

"Trying to get out. I've been moving away the stones, but I still can't get through."

"How's your shoulder?"

"Uh – hurts a bit, but it's ok."

In spite of himself, Hawkes felt a flash of admiration towards the boy. "You don't give up easily, do you?"

"No." Olly's grin could be heard through his voice. And then they both remembered what that particular trait of his had done, and fell silent.

- - - - -

Flack had to prevent himself from giving in to the urge to kick even more debris out of the way as hard as he could. His toe still hurt from the last time. He grit his teeth, hands clenched into fists. He was furious, with Mac and with himself, and in his head he was thinking of all the things he wished he had said when they had been shouting at each other. He would never actually say most of them, but thinking them made him feel slightly mollified.

Mac had been _right_, though, and that was what made it harder to bear. He shouldn't have left. He should have stayed. He slammed his hand into a solid-looking spot of wall, the momentary jar of pain wiping away thoughts for a second. Only a second, and then they all flooded back.

"Hawkes! Stella!" he shouted, shouldering aside a piece of plasterboard which was hanging off the wall and into his way. "Ross!"

They didn't deserve this happening, none of them. Again and again he replayed the last time he'd seen them, a tape on a continuous loop in his head that he couldn't manage to shut off. Even shouting for them, even kicking things and the brief flare of pain brought on by that action wouldn't block the pictures for long. Stella had sent him out into the rain with a laugh, after he'd insulted the three of them. Hawkes, as usual, had been more serious, wanting to know details, and Ross…

With a stab of shame he realised that he had no idea what Adam had said, or if he'd said anything at all. No, he had just stood there, mouse-like, and hadn't protested as he was ignored completely. _I didn't even give him any of the chocolate._

And now, he couldn't get to any of them. They were trapped, somewhere above him. Somewhere in this tangled mess that was both the building and the whole situation. Which room? _The one with the body in._ Funny.

"Stell! Hawkes! Ross!"

Another dead end. Muttering strings of swear words under his breath, he was forced to turn, back the way he'd just come, retracing the footprints he'd left in the dust, passing again the same wreckage, now from the other side.

Maybe his footsteps suddenly sounded infinitesimally hollow. He couldn't hear the difference.

Something caught his eye. Thrown about and smashed, but its shape still clearly visible in the lines of black plastic. A camera. He reached it in a couple of strides, kicking away a board which dared try to impede him.

And suddenly the dead end because of which he'd had to turn back had become a godsend, because he finally held in his hand a clue, a pointer, and he took the opportunity to find the doc's habit of writing labels on everything to be funny, rather than perplexing. 'S. Hawkes'.

"Hawkes!" he yelled. "Doc! You hear me?"

- - - - -

"Hear that?" Olly asked.

Hawkes could. Faint and distorted, but a voice. A real voice. He had almost begun to doubt that anything outside their tiny world of blackness still existed. Long seconds were lost while the fact sank in.

"Shout," he told Olly urgently. "Loud as you can."

"Hey!" Olly yelled, surprising Hawkes with the strength of his voice. "Hey! Help! We're down here!" Hawkes joined the shouting, hope at last flaring up in his chest.

"Anyone hear us? Hey!"

- - - - -

Flack paused to let the echoes of his voice die away. Could he hear something, against the endless drumming of the rain? Noise, voices, slipping up from below him, from his feet, from beneath the floor. He dropped to his knees, not caring about the dust which delightedly latched on to the fabric of his suit. "Hey, doc? You down there?" He could definitely hear something now. He looked around, saw the ceiling arching downwards to meet with the floor, which looked as if it also sloped under the mound of rubble it was hidden beneath. A dead end he had previously turned away from. Too impatient to waste the time which would be required to stand, he crawled to where cracks appeared, cracks in the pattern of a web. "You hear me?"

He bent low. Low enough to catch the faint reply. "I hear you, Don. Get us out?"

A grin split open his face as he turned, shouting again, his words winging joyfully through the air. "Guys! Angell! Mac! Get here now!"

- - - - -

"We're getting out," Olly said quietly. "We're going to get out." He sounded as if he could hardly believe it. Nor could Hawkes. He was smiling widely, unseen in the dark.

"Thanks," he said suddenly, seriously.

Olly sounded surprised. "What for?"

"For climbing up here. We wouldn't have been heard otherwise. You were right."

- - - - -

"Who's down there?" was the first thing Mac wanted to know.

"Not Stella," Flack replied, knowing exactly what question was being asked of him. "It's Hawkes and – some guy called Olly."

Mac nodded grimly. _Not Stella._

Flack waited for him to pick up on the comment about the other guy, the one Hawkes had named as Olly. He had his own ideas about the guy, none of which he was going to say aloud until both of them were out of there safely, because there was still no sign of Stella or Adam, and if he received confirmation that this Olly was responsible for the explosion then he knew he'd have a hard battle with his conscience not to just leave him in that hole. _And that, unfortunately, is treated as professional misconduct._

Angell and Lindsay were currently shifting away shattered concrete, exposing the fragmented floor, hoping for a place where it would stop being a floor at all and merely became debris tumbled together, debris that could be removed. A pile of rubble was slowly being built up to the side of them as they pulled blocks up, following the lode of loose concrete pieces, hoping to find a way through.

There was only room for two people to work abreast, and they'd taken over from Flack when they arrived in answer to his shouting, several minutes later. He was currently wiping his hands clean on his shirt, regaining his breathing rate after his time at digging with his hands, coat and jacket disregarded, lying to one side. There was still no sign of Rescue. For now, it was up to them to get their friends out.

Mac had only arrived a few moments ago, and was barely able to stay still, his worry and impatience written into every impulsive movement of his body. He had missed Flack's comment about Olly completely.

Angell glanced at him, then at Flack, wiping her hand across her forehead to leave a streak of dirt. "Shouldn't someone still be looking for Adam and Stella?"

Flack nodded in agreement, his voice firm, seeing Mac's dilemma. "Mac, go. Shout if you find them. _When_ you find them."

Mac hesitated, just for a second. Conflict raged within him. He was the leader, he should stay. Hawkes was his responsibility just as much as Stella was – probably more, since Stella would kill him for the suggestion that she needed someone else to be responsible for her, even if he was, albeit increasingly theoretically, her boss.

Emotions clouding his view? Maybe.

But Stella and Adam still needed to be found. That was undeniable, whatever his emotions. He wasn't going to lose another person he cared for, not this way, and Flack clearly had this particular rescue under control. "You'll continue looking for them when you're done here?"

"Of course we're going to."

The indecision was gone.

He left, back the way he'd come through the labyrinth of wreckage.

- - - - -

Light. Finally.

A finger-ray of light stabbed into their concrete prison, just in front of him. Then another, and another. He could hear Olly beside him, pulling stones again, this time with a purpose. He joined him, neither of them speaking. They were so close… so close… Saying their shared hope aloud could shatter it.

And then, quite suddenly, there was a fist-sized hole between two solid concrete slabs. He peered out, blinking, into a dip which seemed to have been purposely dug out. Everything lit with a light which was at first blinding in its intensity after so long in the dark, but quickly paled to a much-muted daylight. He could only see the greyness of concrete and dust.

Voices. He could hear the others clearly now.

He took delight in the sounds, placing them to faces he couldn't yet see.

"I can get probably get down there now, I'm the smallest." That was Lindsay.

"Good idea. We'll help pull them out from up here." Flack.

"I'll give you a hand down." Angell.

He listened as someone, presumably Lindsay, jumped down into the trench and put her hand into the hole, fingers finding purchase at the edge of the largest slab. "I'll pull, you put your shoulder to it," she suggested.

"Gotcha." He was glad that she had wasted no time in small talk, the urge to be out in the light, in the openness, consuming him, now that he was so close. Together they forced his cold concrete jailor outwards, both of them spurred on by the shouts of encouragement from above. Each faint vibration of its movement under his hands brought him closer to freedom, and each breath he took, deep from the effort, was another one that didn't hold the promise of suffocation silently within it. The noise the slab made as it finally crashed free was quite possibly the most welcome sound he'd ever heard.

He could get out. He scrunched his eyes up against the sudden influx of light, feeling like a mole surfacing through the skin of earth.

Aided by hands pulling eagerly at him he clambered up, and out, moving ever upwards, towards light, towards the hidden sun, like a plant grown too long in the dark. "Good to see you all," he said, grinning, knowing that whatever he chose to say would be an understatement at his relief at finally, finally escaping from the clutching dark.

"Good to see you too, doc," Flack told him, clapping him on the shoulder. Angell patted his back, and Lindsay hugged him, broad smiles beaming from the three of them, a second of satisfaction before they had to think of anything else.

But there was something he had to know, straight away, before he could return their greetings properly. "Stella and Adam – are they ok? Have you found them?"

He looked at their faces, as elation drained silently away, and didn't need to ask again.


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N: Once again, I manage to be horrendously slow with an update... Please forgive me? This is my longest yet, if that counts for anything.**

**Thank you very, very much to everyone who've reviewed, and also to everyone who've put this story on alerts or favorites. I'm also saying thank you to the people who've been poking me and encouraging me to get a move on with this chapter!  
**

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Mac left the others burrowing into the basement, walking as fast as he could, almost running, although running would serve no purpose because he would miss things then, maybe clues. He was frustrated, furious, terrified, caught in a knot of emotions. Everything was moving too slow, always too slow. Himself, Rescue, their own feeble attempts at locating the missing members of his team, himself again, especially himself. He had to find a way to get higher, to the storey above, and then on until he found them. _Third floor, that's where they are._ He was searching too slowly. The tangle of clutching wreckage impeded him at every turn. _Too slow. Too slow._

Everything was too slow except for time, which was accelerating to an improbable velocity. A vector line, which extended away from him even as he desperately chased along it. Somewhere at its end were Stella, and Adam. He had stopped calling for them. If he didn't call, then he wouldn't expect them to answer, because how _could_ they answer if there was nothing to hear?

A way up. He found a place where the walls were rent, torn down along with half the ceiling, and tested their strength, hanging his weight on them. They didn't move. He put his hand in a crack, pulling himself up, swinging, kicking for a foothold. He missed, slipping roughly down again.

Angrily he stripped off the coat and jacket which impeded his movements, tossing them to the ground. On the second attempt he chose to look where he was aiming at first, and this time was successful as he finally pulled himself up through the place where the ceiling had collapsed. He rolled away from the drop and stood up without waiting to catch his breath.

One floor up. Two more to go.

- - - - -

The cold water lapped at Adam's hand. He moved his fingers, liquid shifting into currents. Silk. Ghost-silk, as cold as Stella's touch. He was comforted by her being there. He didn't want to be alone.

"Stella?" he whispered. He thought he heard something, something above the endless background of the rain. "Stella?" he whispered again, louder. Her hand in his, the water holding his other hand. He had been hardly aware of his surroundings, nearly asleep. Nearly. But he knew, suddenly and strongly, that now he had to wake up, before he lost the choice to do so, knowing with a part of his mind that he refused too look at closely that it hadn't been only sleep that he'd been near to sliding into.

_I don't want to die._

The grey walls wavered as he forced his eyes open, leering over him, waiting for their fly to stop struggling. He turned his head, saw the grey pool of water beginning to be stained red. His blood, still quietly and steadily leaving him. But he had to do something. He was suddenly clear on that. Because both of them had to survive, and it was up to him now.

_I won't let Stella down._

- - - - -

Mac was fighting his way forward through the dim light, the ceaseless drumming of the rain nearly lost among his ragged breathing, fighting the building which tried to hold him back, fighting the wreckage, fighting the way his body protested as he didn't stop, not for an instant. There wasn't time to stop. He could feel the lack of time very clearly, dreaded each heartbeat which hammered in his chest, counting off another segment of time which he would never be able to get back again. His goal iterated itself into every breath, every beat. A way up. Find it. Now.

Too slow. Go faster.

"Stella! Adam!" He had told himself he wasn't going to shout for them, but was unable to completely repress the hope that they would answer. "Stella!" He stood perfectly still for a second, holding his breath, waiting to hear them.

Nothing.

He found the stairwell, finally, but knew that it wasn't any good, because he stood by a pile of crushed concrete, steps squashed as easily as a ball of paper, and above him, the place where they had been ripped off. He would have to find another way.

"Stella!"

- - - - -

He'd moved before, and he could do it again. He'd found his way down to this place. Now he could find his way out, get help for them both, because he had to, because there was no one else and so it was up to him. He let go of Stella's hand, laying it down softly. He had heard someone, he was sure that just then he had heard someone calling. Stella had said that Mac was coming for the two of them, and she would be right, of course she would be right, she always was, everyone always said so. Especially her.

He pushed himself up, every movement slowed, the air wrapping around him, denser than water, resisting him, supporting him. He needed strength now, and he took it from the memory of Stella's hand squeezing his, from the ghosts made from shadows which whispered encouragement to him, from the only colour amongst the greys, the bright colour which marked his previous passage. This was what he _had_ to do, for both of them, so he _would_ be able to do it. He had to move onwards, because Mac would look for them in the wrong place, and he would have to explain that they were somewhere else, in the wrong room, on the wrong floor.

His feet dragged through the water as he began, once again, to crawl forward. It hurt so much that it was unreal to him, the pain, just something that existed, that didn't matter much. It was so all-pervasive that it could just be set aside and ignored. He concentrated on moving, and listening. Listening, for now, to the rain.

- - - - -

The grey rain fell, down and down, water that had travelled from around the world to fall here, to fall now. Teardrops made from rivers, oceans, melted snow. The water soaked down into the mud, seeping through the earth, down and down through the bones of the city, the roots of the buildings. It pulled the earth with it, reluctant to leave. Because nothing wants to leave the daylight. Not ever.

- - - - -

"Stella! Adam!"

It was faint, a voice with no real hope left. A voice which echoed around, so heavy with despair that it could barely float upwards. But it did, and he heard it.

"Mac!" He had meant to shout, but it was hardly more than a whisper. Even he could hardly hear himself. But Mac would need to hear it, or it would be too late, too late for Stella. _And for me._ It was the first time he had voiced that.

He hadn't got very far yet. But the whispers drifting through his head suggested an idea to him, and he stopped, and pulled a stone from the floor. It was the size of his fist, and he had to drop it because it was too heavy. He found another one, a smaller one. He thought that it was a good thing really, the building smashed up, because otherwise there wouldn't be any stones for him to use, and then realised there was something wrong with that, but couldn't quite work out what it was. He threw it down the corridor, towards where he thought Mac's voice had come from, hearing it bounce lightly. He picked up another and threw that too, the sound again caught and deadened by the mesh of the building, which didn't want to let him go.

Then he crawled forwards again, because he had to keep going, had to find someone. He kept throwing stones he found, hoping that the noise they made would be loud enough, knowing that it probably wasn't. He was on the edge of not being able to bear it, wanting to stop, wanting everything to stop, but he kept going. _Just for a minute. You can bear it for another minute, can't you?_ And then for another minute, and then for one more.

- - - - -

The rain fell, down, down, down, pooling and puddling, sinking into the earth, into the mud. It gnawed its way, down through the broken structure, beneath the cracked foundations. It slithered, slid, thin grey snakes taking bites of mud.

- - - - -

Mac reached up along the crushed wall, measuring with his eyes the distance to the crumpled ceiling above him, and to the hole where it fell altogether. He reckoned he could make it through the gap, maybe half a metre of air laterally between its edge and the closest foothold he could risk his weight on.

He pushed himself up, swinging his body over, using his momentum to propel him to where he was able to grab with his fingers the edge of the hole, and pulled himself up by his arms, grunting with the effort and sending a silent prayer of thanks for his marine training. His feet kicked instinctively at the empty air below him as he pushed his body up, managing to get his knee in position to lever himself through what was now for him the floor, and forwards, to a solid surface.

A couple of seconds, this time, he wasted pulling air back into his lungs, and letting the strain in his muscles fade. He wasn't in a good area, he saw, looking around. Of course, the higher up he got the more damaged he should expect the rooms to be, and there wasn't standing room in here, just a chaos filling most of the airspace, a jumble which he didn't spend time on working out where it came from. He took another too-long second to grasp his bearings, and then began to shift out of the way, his direction confirmed as he found himself handling pieces of the splintered door, pulling away the handle with its label directing him to 'Push' instead.

Then out of the room, as soon as he'd made a gap large enough to fit through, and the corridor was mostly clear, but he didn't stop to take any of his surroundings in as he forced his way along the short path to the stairs which he had been unable to reach before and were now only a few paces away. He took the steps two at a time, and then suddenly stopped, crouching down to confirm what his eyes were telling him. A punctuated trail of red smears. Blood.

The meaning of it sank in, his brain as always geared to analyse, to draw conclusions from any evidence he was presented with. One of them at least was still alive, still motile, had moved either up or down the stairs. He tried to discern a direction, and thought that it was probably downwards. He followed it back down again to the level he'd come from, and saw, now that he was looking, the clear marks of someone forcing their way through the tangled mess along the corridor.

"Stella! Adam!" he shouted, for the first time allowing himself to believe that he would get a reply, belief quickly becoming _desperation_ for a reply.

And, at last, a reply came.

- - - - -

"Mac?" Words were heavy. They left his mouth reluctantly, and surely not loud enough. He picked up another stone, throwing this one hard, with purpose, and it made a satisfying rattle against something metallic. He was hating his weakness. Earlier he had managed to find Stella, had shouted for her, and then reached her. Now Mac was looking for them, and he had left Stella and now he couldn't even seem to get himself found.

_You. Can. Do. This._

"Mac!" That was more like it. He heard his voice shape into the word, leaving his mouth and drifting away from him, snagging on beams and sharp corners, ever reducing in size, but it kept going. For just long enough.

- - - - -

Mac heard the indistinct call and the clanging rattle of the stone on metal, and pushed towards the sounds, fighting the thorn-thicket of destruction, the building's tangle which wanted to keep him out. It stabbed and scraped at his bare arms where he'd rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. "Where are you?" he called, still not knowing who he was talking to, only that it was someone, and that he desperately needed an answer.

"Mac?"

This time, he recognised the voice. "Adam?" There was a low gap in an otherwise impenetrable barrier, and he dropped to hands and knees to crawl through it. He felt a slight tremouring of the structure, a malevolent vibration that shook loose particles of choking dust. For a second he froze instinctively, then it stopped, and he carried on.

Adam was just on the other side, kneeling, leaning forward, supporting himself with his hands braced against the floor.

Mac's eyes widened, because Adam's shirt was soaked in blood, and his face was pale and frightened. "Don't move," he said, urgently. "You're hurt. Let me see."

Adam shook his head forcibly. "No, no, you have to go on – Stella's there…"

"Stella? Is she alright?"

Adam shook his head again, stammering over his words. "She – she's really hurt. You have to – "

Mac felt the blood pounding in his ears, almost deafening him. "Where?" he asked.

"Back – back there."

He wanted to run, to find her that very moment. But he couldn't leave Adam here on his own. Not as badly injured as he looked, and not beneath this ceiling of wreckage, some pieces of which seemed only loosely held together. "C'mon," he said. "Let me help you." He put his arm across Adam's back, beneath his shoulders, and helped him struggle to his feet. Supporting him as the two of them stumbled across the uneven floor.

"Just round there, at the edge," Adam gasped, but Mac had already picked out the doorway through which they would have to pass by the smeared red trail. They ducked under the half-collapsed threshold, and Adam's knees buckled, the last of his strength giving out, sobbing for breath. "Stop, stop – let me down!"

"Ok, I've got you." Mac lowered him to the floor, where he could lean against a pile of rubble. He quickly unbuttoned the shirt he was wearing, not cold in only in the t-shirt beneath it after his stint at what Stella would call 'playing action man'. He rolled the pale blue fabric into a bundle, and pressed it tightly against Adam's side. "Hold that in place, it'll slow the bleeding. I'll get you out of here." Adam nodded weakly, not bothering to mention the piece of whatever-it-was that was now being pushed further inside him. It wouldn't matter for very much longer, because now that Mac was here, he'd be out soon. And, in any case, he was unable to press it very hard.

Mac stood up fast, glanced around, saw Stella. He half-walked, half-ran as fast as he dared, feet sliding on the debris he trod over. There was water, a pool of water spreading across the floor, and it had nearly reached her. More blood. Adam's. _Too much of it_. But he could only do one thing at a time.

"Stella," he whispered, kneeling down next to her, taking in her situation in a single, agonising glance. "Stella, talk to me." Her skin was cold as silk, and her lips had a blue tint, but when he held his palm against them he felt the faint stir of her breath. "Stella. Stella." He took her hand that lay clear, fingertips trailing in the grey pool of rainwater, and chafed it, trying to force warmth into her. "Stella, I'm going to get help. You just hang on, ok? Hang on for me."

He didn't want to leave her, now that he'd found her at last, but she needed to get out, and quickly, and he couldn't do that on his own. But if he got the others, if they got the concrete away from her, she might be alright. He clung onto that thought, brushing her loose hair away from her face, touching his lips to the back of her cold hand.

He stood.

- - - - -

And still the rain fell, twisting into streams which still slithered around the foundations, the foundations which had been shattered by the charge of the explosion. The water still pulled at the mud, teasing it away, and, juddering, it came. Just a little, just a little, just a little more. And a little more, hollowing out bites. Just water, washing it away. Just the rain.

- - - - -

He was halfway across the room. Already taking in the breath with which he would shout for Flack and the others, to get help. Surely they would have Hawkes out by now.

And then the building shifted, tightening its grip once again.

Just a little.

Just a little, enough to make the floor shake and a shower of small particles dislodge from walls, and then just enough for the ceiling above them to buckle, and begin to splinter open. Adam watched, and stared, watching the net of cracks forming above his head, everything moving so slowly, a whole eternity contained within each breath he managed to take. He saw Mac's eyes widen, realising what was about to happen. The jolt of movement stopped almost before it began, but the ceiling was going to fall, going to crush them…

And only Mac had the possibility of evasion. Adam watched, seeing the other man's face freeze into a mask of horror, because the choice of what to do was with him, and him alone, and he only had a second in which to make his choice, of who to protect, who to save.

Adam, or Stella.

Adam could see Mac's choice lined up, already knew which one he would take.

He chose Stella.

Adam understood it, with the serenity of the inevitable. He would always choose Stella.

Mac reached her lightly breathing form, and grabbed the piece of boarding that had covered her before, and held it over both of them as a shield, leaning over her. Adam saw, and hoped that it would be strong enough to protect them both.

He wanted Stella to be alright.

He tried to curl himself up, arms over his head, but found that he couldn't curl up very far at all. Mac's bunched-up shirt slipped to the ground as he let go of it, and he couldn't really tell what colour it had originally been, probably a pale blue, but now it was mostly red.

Then the ceiling, which had become the sky above, began to fall. Parts of it cracking away, massive raindrops, hailstones. With the precision of a targeted missile, making a laughing whistle down through the air, a piece plunged at his side, striking, burrowing. He screamed with the impact. He hadn't before, had tried to make no noise at all from the pain.

_Might as well, now. Nothing left to lose from it._

He found he couldn't draw the air back in again, his chest muscles unresponsive. But then, he didn't feel any great urgency for air. He forgot about the danger of the falling objects and slumped sideways, down to the floor, head knocking against the hardness of it, hearing more pieces of concrete thump down around him, but he knew that they weren't going to hit him, and then they stopped falling. And everything was fading, colours were draining away fast, and he could see black blood around him on the grey floor, and he wondered if it was his.

He felt as if he was watching everything through an old television set, in black and white, no sound, and the picture slightly fuzzy from poor signal. The pain was gone too. He was numb.

A white face appeared near to him, grey lips moving, and he wondered whether he should be paying proper attention to what the person was saying, but it probably wasn't that important. He looked beyond the face and the grey walls were blurring, all the greys blending together, but one sight stood out, and that was Stella's white hand, Stella's fingers moving, Stella's head struggling to turn.

And he looked back at the face, looked at Mac, whose mouth was forming one word, over and over again, his eyes wide, horrified, spilling over with guilt.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry.

He wanted to say that it didn't matter, to tell him that he'd done the right thing, that he too would have chosen Stella over him if he'd been Mac, but he couldn't form the words, and there was no air to do so, anyway.

He thought, _I don't want to die,_ but that was the wrong thought, and he let it slip away, and instead he knew, clearly, that if he hadn't come down to find Stella, hadn't left a trail for Mac to follow, then Mac wouldn't have found her by now either and she might have been crushed just a few moments ago while Mac still searched the third floor uselessly. So he smiled, because he had always wanted to do something that was _right_, and now he had. He had just a second where he was buoyed with pride, lighter than air, and he let the euphoric feeling flood through him, knowing somehow that this time he didn't have to repress it and think of something else, because he could just be _him_, just be Adam Ross, could be the one who'd saved Stella.

He could be the hero.

He'd always wanted to be that, and now, just for a little while, that could be him, and no one would tell him otherwise.

He smiled.

Adam closed his eyes.


	14. Chapter 14

**A/N: Thank you for waiting so patiently! I've been (more than) slightly overwhelmed with exams and stuff, but I **_**finally**_** have another chapter… After this, there's only one left, an epilogue of sorts.**

**Thank you for everyone who has this story on favourite or alert, and especially thank you to everyone who's reviewed, I'd love it if you continue, or start now. I have a nagging suspicion that there are one or two reviews I haven't replied to, if that's the case feel free to poke me, and I apologise! :)**

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Rain, and rain, and rain. It fell at its same relentless rate, threads of it, sheets of it, curtains of it, curtains closing on a final act. Chance and gusts of wind formed patterns in it, shapes, ghosts which were there one second and gone the next, designs briefly woven into the grey threads of the loom.

People looked up at the sky and cursed the rain, but it wasn't sentient, despite appearances, and didn't mind. It could only fall, which it did unceasingly, splashing onto the surface of streets which had become shallow rivers, sliding down the windscreen of an ambulance at last nearing its destination as it fought its way through a city choked with water, soaking into the shirt of a woman with bobbed hair waiting impatiently in the middle of a road for its arrival, seeping in through broken walls and spreading across the floor of a shattered room, lapping comfortingly at the shoe-soles of a man with black hair thick with dust, his eyes filled with more devastation than was in the wreckage which surrounded him.

It was everywhere, everywhere across the whole city, and across the land to one side, and the sea to the other.

A man with hair the same grey as the rain still watched it fall, sheets of water beyond sheets of glass. He had heard the news of course, everyone had. Danny had told him when Detective Angell had finally placed her call; he'd run into Sid's office, his movements fast, urgent, but the spring that usually accompanied every move he made was only conspicuous by its absence. And then he'd left again almost immediately, refusing to accept that there was nothing he could do, no way he could be useful.

Sid had been left to wait, and watch the rain. He wasn't religious usually, but he prayed now for his friends, prayed to every god he had ever heard of, working his way across cultures and back through history, in case one of them was listening. There had been no more news since Sheldon had returned from being checked out at the hospital, and told him that both Stella and Adam were only just clinging on to life. Adam only very, very weakly. He both longed and dreaded to know what had happened since.

He watched the rain. It drew patterns for him, wove into its threads the story of everything which had happened and was going to happen, but he couldn't read it.

- - - - -

"You shouldn't still be here, doc."

Hawkes shrugged in reply, not tearing his gaze from the one-way glass. "Where should I be?"

"Home in bed?" Flack suggested. "Or at the hospital?"

"Mac's there," Hawkes said. "He says he'll get in touch if he hears anything. He wasn't really in a talking mood, pretty much sent me away."

"He still trying to second-guess himself?"

"Yeah. Same as you're doing, Don."

"And you."

"Yeah."

They fell silent, and Flack followed Hawkes's gaze through the glass. Olly was hunched over the table, his head in his hands. The white dressing covering the line of stitches on his forehead was just visible through his fingers. The sight of him made his gut churn with anger and renewed guilt, his hands unconsciously clenching into fists. "Let's get this over with," he said. "He's already made his statement, we just need to wrap it up."

"You mean, arrest him." It wasn't a question; they both knew he already knew the answer.

"You sure it's a good idea for you to be in there too?"

Hawkes nodded firmly. "I promised him I would."

"You made a promise to a murderer."

"Don, he didn't mean to – "

"I don't give a damn whether he meant it or not!" The anger erupted unconstrained out of Flack. "You think that makes it better?"

"Right now, apparently it doesn't. But like you said before, Don, maybe this wouldn't have happened if you hadn't left. _You_ didn't mean for this to happen, either." Hawkes's voice was deliberately calm, silently sorry for the effect he knew his words were causing.

"You think I don't know that?"

"I _know_ you know that."

Flack smacked the flat of his hand against the wall. "So why – "

"Why am I defending him? He's not a bad kid, Don. He made a mistake. All of us made mistakes." He paused, realising how Flack's words and his were paralleling him and Olly in the basement. "You want someone to blame? Blame me. I went down into that basement without backup, without letting anyone know what was going on."

"Doc – "

"Don, this is all of our faults. I'm just saying, don't take all of it out on the kid. _Any_ of us could have prevented it, but we didn't. No one knew what was going to happen."

Flack shook his head angrily. "Maybe you're right, doc, but as far as I can see, the kid started it all, and I have a problem with feeling well-disposed towards him while we don't even know if Stella and Adam are gonna make it or not. C'mon." Clearly tired of talking, he led the way into the interrogation room, and Hawkes followed him. Olly looked up as the two men entered.

"Hey, Hawkes," he said quietly, his voice defeated.

Hawkes gave him a small smile as he leaned against the wall. Flack took the empty chair at the opposite side of the table. "You've already been interviewed, and we've read your statement," Flack said brusquely. "You're going to be officially taken into custody now."

"What's going to happen to me?" Olly asked, timid in the face of the hostility radiating from Flack. "Am I going to prison?" His eyes were fixed on Hawkes, who nodded slightly as he replied.

"You're going to trial," he said. "And then probably, yes, to prison. The sentence you get doesn't depend on us. That depends on what the jury decides."

"I hope you realise what you've done," Flack said grimly. "I hope it stays with you for the rest of your life."

"I'm sorry," Olly said, wretchedly. "I really am."

"Good, I'm glad to hear it." Flack stood up. "We're done here now."

He strode from the room. Hawkes followed, more slowly. He paused by Olly, and clapped him softly on the shoulder. "I'll be at your trial," he said, his voice not unsympathetic. "For what it's worth, good luck."

He shut the door behind him and found Flack leaning leadenly against the wall opposite, his eyes closed. "You're probably right in what you said, doc," he said tiredly. "Didn't mean to snap at you. But right now…"

"I know." Hawkes felt equally tired. "Right now, all we can do is wait."

- - - - -

Mac stood by the coffee machine in the hallway. The pale green walls were probably in an attempt to be relaxing, but they made him think of mould, and decay.

"Excuse me, Sir?"

He glanced round at the young woman jiggling coins in her hand. He started, and stepped out of her way to let her use the machine. He watched her coffee dispense, brown liquid foaming out of the nozzle into the cardboard cup. She snapped its plastic lid in place, and gave him a slight smile which seemed reassuring as she hurried away, heels tapping on the linoleum floor.

Once again he counted the coins in his hand, stared at the buttons with their list of options. His mind seemed to be blank, and he couldn't choose. They became a litany of meaningless syllables which he recited over and over again in the silence of his head, blocking out all other thoughts which kept trying to creep in. Black coffee, white coffee, cappuccino, latte, mocha, hot chocolate. And then repeated in decaffeinated. _Why so many different kinds?_ Black coffee, white coffee, cappuccino…

"Mac?" A familiar voice behind him, and he turned his head slowly to see Sid watching him, eyes concerned. "I've been looking for you."

"I'm – " He cleared his throat, swallowing to unstick his voice. "I'm getting coffee."

"I asked a nurse if she knew where to find you when she came into the waiting room. She says you've been out here for over half an hour now."

He glanced at his watch. Collaborating evidence. "Oh."

Sid reached into his pocket, retrieving coins of his own, and Mac watched him slot them into the machine and press for a black coffee. "Two sugars, isn't it?"

"How'd you know?" Mac asked, not really caring.

"I pay attention. It's what Stella always brings you."

Mac shut his eyes for a second at the mention of Stella. When he opened them, Sid was pressing the cardboard cup into his hand. He accepted it, and the two paper packets of sugar. "Thanks."

"Do you know – "

"Anything? No." Mac balanced the cup on the edge of the shelf where Sid had taken the sugar from. He ripped the packets slowly, watching the fibres from the cheap, rough paper pull apart, poured the contents into the drink, white sugar grains, tiny cubes, falling in a slow cascade to disappear immediately beneath the surface of the brown liquid, the cup's diameter too small to allow ripples to form. "No one's told me anything since I got here." His tone was too loud, bitter. "Both of them could be dead, for all I know." There. He'd voiced it, after spending hours now avoiding that thought. He avoided looking at Sid as he picked up the cup, hand shaking enough for drops of the boiling liquid to splash onto his skin.

His statement might have been about the weather prospects, for all that it showed in Sid's voice as he replied. "You can't stand in a hallway all day, you know."

Mac shrugged. He took a sip of his drink, tasting the weak coffee and the laminated cardboard rim of the cup. The sweetness of the sugar cloyed in his throat.

Sid put his hand on his shoulder, his eyes kind. "You should go back in there. Someone else might come looking for you."

Mac shook his head. He couldn't bear the waiting room any longer. In there he had felt as if he was being suffocated, his actions hanging round him in the air, his guilt forming a noose around his neck. "Why are you here?" he asked instead, realising that the question had come out wrongly, but not bothering to clarify it.

"I'm worried."

"I said I'd call when there's any news," Mac said, more harshly than he meant.

"I know that. It's you I'm worried about, right now." He watched Mac lift the cup to his lips, tilt it slightly, swallow, and then bring it down again. The level of the coffee inside hadn't reached his mouth. "Sheldon told me you were taking this hard."

Mac's face was blank, and Sid couldn't tell what he might be thinking as he continued to stare down into his cup. "I'm fine," he said at last.

Sid sighed, defeated. "No, you aren't, but you clearly don't want to talk about it, so I'll leave you be." His voice was gentle. "If you want to talk to someone, just call them. You didn't do anything wrong."

To Mac, the irony contained within Sid's words seemed to echo up and down the sterilised corridors. He shook his head, a heavy weight inside him. "Sid, you don't – this is my fault. I chose to leave Adam to die."

"No." Sid put a hand on his shoulder. "That isn't what you chose, Mac. You chose to save Stella, and that's not the same thing at all. Hold on to that."

- - - - -

Angell pushed a chair alongside Flack's, behind his desk, and dropped into it. For long minutes she just sat there, watching him pretend to fill in a form, the pen hovering over the unblemished field boxes, motionless. His shoulders had relaxed slightly as she'd sat down, but he gave no other sign of being aware of her presence.

"Chocolate?" she asked at last, pulling a bar out of her pocket and sliding it across to him.

He picked it up, but for now made no move to open it. "Thanks."

"You're welcome." She had waited before coming to him, wanting to give him space to think things through, and also thinking of things to say to him. But now all her silently rehearsed words disappeared. "Stop blaming yourself," she said.

"It was _my fault_. Mac blames me too," came the instant reply.

"Don, you and Mac need to talk to each other," she said firmly, the faintest hint of a whine in his voice having told her that the route of pure sympathy wasn't the way to go.

"You think he wants to talk to _me_?"

"I think Mac's being Mac, and doesn't want to talk to anyone right now. I also think that right now both of you are too worried to think straight."

He turned his head towards her, his eyes lost. "Jess, what if – "

She shook her head. "No. Don't go there. Not yet." He looked down at the papers again, and sighed heavily in response. She took the chocolate bar out of his hand, and opened it, snapping off a couple of squares and thrusting them towards him almost aggressively. "Eat it."

"Why?" he asked, running his hand across his face.

"It'll make you feel better." He raised his eyebrows disbelievingly, and somehow she knew exactly what to say. "It's magic chocolate. Trust me."

Despite himself, he smiled, and leaned into her as she put her arm around his shoulders. She pushed the chocolate at his face, and he opened his mouth obediently. She let her fingertip brush against his lips for just a second more than necessary. "Is it working?" she asked.

Some of the heaviness he had been carrying around on his shoulders seemed to lift away. "A bit."

"I told you it was magic," she said, and rested her cheek against his forehead, the warmth in the contact reassuring them both.

- - - - -

The cardboard cup was still in Mac's hand, although more hours had gone by. He swirled it, watching the cold liquid which half filled it shift against the sides. He sat on the edge of an uncushioned chair in the waiting room, the walls on each side of him rising up to imprison him. There was a window, but all he could see in the gloom of evening was the concrete wall of an adjoining wing, only a couple of metres away. And faintly, of course, the endless rain.

There was still no news. None at all. He could only guess, and none of his guesses cheered him. Raindrops fell like tears from a sky which already might already know what he didn't.

Stella. Could he imagine life without Stella?

He stared down into his cup, and tried to decide whether to go out to the coffee machine to get another.

Not much point. He closed his eyes, and tried to picture her smile. _You chose to save her. _There had been acceptance on Adam's face, as if he too had made the same choice. _Hold on to that._

_Hold on to that._

- - - - -

Outside, unnoticed in the gloom, the rain slowed, the last drops falling to be absorbed by the sodden ground, its thirst at last slated. Run-off water drained away down gutters, and the heavy clouds began to drift apart, glimpses of the dark clear sky beyond visible through gaps.

The smell of wet foliage filled the cool air. Free now from the barrage of drumming water, trembling green leaves stilled, spread to catch the fading light of the sky, began to breathe again.


	15. Chapter 15

**A/N: Yes, I finally have the last chapter up! It took much longer than I'd intended to write. Thanks for your patience, and thank you also to the people who've been poking me with varying degrees of subtlety to get this finished! More of an author's note at the end...  
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There was darkness surrounding her, lying over and wrapping around her like a childhood quilt. _Now I lay me down to sleep…_ Safe, and warm. Suspended within a pool of eiderdown, layers upon layers of feathers gently brushing over her face, her hands, her hair, feathers piled over her thick as midwinter snow, layers of silence and softness blocking all the light. She didn't want to leave.

Sounds began to filter down through the feathers, which began to fall away from her, brushing her hands, brushing over her eyelids as the darkness became less absolute, the screen that was over her eyes beneath the lids beginning to dissolve, melt away.

Someone called her back, a voice she couldn't place but would have followed anywhere, calling her name over and over, a sea of sound swelling, the waves of it breaking over her head.

Eyes struggling open. Light.

The circle of a face, looking down at her.

Blink, slowly. Darkness, then light again.

The same face, with blurred edges, drawn in greys, light and dark. Light skin, dark hair.

Blink.

In focus now, the face familiar, contours that she knew well, grey-green eyes that were waiting, waiting for her to recognise him.

Blink.

"Stella? Stella, can you hear me?"

She searched her throat for her voice, finally found it, although it was weaker than she had expected. "Mac."

She felt his hand in hers, squeezing it gently. "Don't try to move, ok?"

"Ok."

She turned her head, though, and he settled back down into a chair. The remembered darkness still muffling her thoughts, she accepted without question the fact that he was there. Of course he was. But after a few seconds had gone by, she realised that she didn't know where 'there' was. "Mac? What – "

He read the worry in her eyes, speaking calmly, reassuringly. "You're in the hospital, Stella. You're safe. You're going to be fine soon, you just need to rest for now."

Obediently, she closed her eyes, letting herself sink back into the comfort of the darkness, despite a faint nagging feeling that there was something wrong. Her mind drifted. Patchworked scraps of memory rose up through it, all tinged with grey, all dissolving at the edges. _Down came the rain, and washed the spider out…_ Voices. Faces. Pain. Grey concrete, and Adam's face, Adam's voice afraid. Water. Concrete. Spiders.

_A scream, someone screaming, everything crashing down, blurred figures, Adam slumping to the ground, blood, red blood, and Mac next to him, pressing a blood-soaked shirt against his side, but his eyes were closed, and then everything blurred again, and then there was just darkness for her…_

Her eyes snapped open as she was suddenly clawing for air in a blind panic. Mac was leaning over her in a second, catching her loosely flailing hand, her shoulder, holding her firmly to anchor her to reality. "Stella! Stella, calm down. It's ok. It's ok."

She shook her head, struggling to make sense, to become fully awake, fingers closing around his as tightly as she could clasp them, which wasn't very tight at all. "Adam – where's Adam? Mac, he was hurt, he was bleeding…"

Eyes fixed on his, she saw his face clench in sudden pain. "I…"

She clutched his hand, her voice desperate. "Mac, tell me. Is he ok?"

The pause only increased her fear, as he caught his breath, his eyes suddenly shadowed, his face paler. "Mac? Please, tell me. Say something."

And Mac told her, everything, choking out the story as water welled glassily in his eyes, spilled down her cheeks in rivulets.

- - - - -

The rain had stopped. The ground dried, slowly, and the remains of the half-shattered building were razed, the rubble carted away, until there was nothing visible left at all.

Time passed. It always did, always would.

- - - - -

The sun smiled down through young green leaves, casting dappled patterns on the path. The branches dipped in the light breeze, patches of shade ebbing and shifting, shadows dancing hand-in-hand with the sunbeams. Stones still damp from the morning's dew glinted like gems or dulled to insignificance, depending on chance, and on the beholder.

A man walked slowly along the dirt path, his eyes taking in the greenness surrounding him, the plants stretching up to the sun. The damp earth beneath his feet held the shape of his footprints as he passed.

- - - - -

A woman sat on a bench beneath the shade of a weeping silver birch, leaves trembling and shimmering above her, head tipped back. She looked up at the approach of feet, brushing strands of hair away from her face where they'd been tugged by the breeze. "You're late," she said, by way of a greeting.

"Good to see you too, Stell."

The mock sternness relaxed into a smile. "Thanks for coming, Mac."

"I'm happy to." He sat down beside her, handing her one of the cups of coffee he'd carried from the vendor near where he'd parked his car. "I hope it's still warm. How are you doing?"

"Not too bad. Looking forward to coming back to work."

"When you're ready for it, Stell. Not when you want to be ready."

"I _am_ ready, to come back to the lab anyway."

He groaned. "No. Give it another week, at least. We went through all this last night at dinner."

"Well, I thought that you asking me the same thing barely twelve hours later meant that maybe you were receptive to a different answer."

Her teasing words drew a smile from him, and he wrapped his hand around hers, marvelling as he did so that she still existed, that he could feel the warmth of her smooth skin, creasing at the joints, and the reassuring solidity of the bones beneath as her fingers echoed the folding of his, soft pressure as their palms nestled against each other. He held her hand gently in his, aware now of how easily she could be hurt, could be taken away from him. He was determined not to cause her any more pain.

She, of course, knew what he was thinking. She always did. Without warning she suddenly tightened her grip to that of a vice, squashing the bones of his hand together. "Ouch!" he complained.

Laughing slightly, she released him. "See? I'm not going to break, Mac."

He still couldn't quite believe it, not just yet. But he was getting there. _They_ were getting there.

The breeze shook the last of the may from the hawthorn trees, tiny white petals tossed haphazardly, whirling through the air to settle at last, white against the green of the grass. A wisp of cloud scurried across the face of the sun, a fleeting shade and momentary coolness that quickly moved on.

"Aren't you going to tell me the gossip?" she asked. The impish sparkle in her eyes was infectious, dragging him back to the moment, clearing the clouds from his mind.

"That depends," he replied, a smile tugging upwards the corners of his mouth, in response to hers.

"On what?"

"On who else you're getting gossip from. I want to make sure my stories are going to match up."

She laughed. "Oh, you needn't worry about that, I've been getting gossip from everyone – no one's stories match up accurately. Danny's match up to nothing else on Earth, though."

"Hardly surprising."

A pigeon noticed the two of them and landed ungainly near their feet, hoping for crumbs. He watched as she unbuttoned her jacket, fingers slower than he was accustomed to seeing them. "Talk," she demanded.

What was there to talk about? "The lab's pretty quiet. There's a case I'm working on at the moment, a nightclub dancer found in an alley, when the test results come back I'll have to leave you here for now."

"Tell me about the important stuff. I can catch up on this any day."

"What do you mean, the important stuff?" The pigeon gave up on searching for nonexistent food, fixing them with a beady glare before launching itself into the sky. He followed it with his eyes until it cleared the tree line, finally turning back to Stella.

The look from her green eyes was piercing. "I think you know what I mean. The questions you've always said you'll answer 'later', but never have."

He met her eyes with his own. A bleakness crept into his face and voice. "I – I'll talk about it, but not right now. Later."

She nodded, slowly, and allowed him to put his arm around her, this time not saying anything as he touched her as if she was made of glass. "I'll wait." The same pattern of question and answer that they had repeated every time they were together. She wished that she could fix what was broken in him, but all that she could do was wait for as long as it took, and hope that she was helping him to heal.

His pager beeped, dispelling the sombreness had begun to hang around them in the air. He checked the display. "I need to go back. I'll see you tonight at your place?"

She replied with an affirmative, and he squeezed her hand again gently as he stood up, reluctant to let her go.

He kept looking back at her as he left, and she laughed and waved him onwards, knowing that he would soon be back with her again.

- - - - -

The man carried on along the path, his feet slowing, hands in his pockets. He didn't want to arrive too early, and anyway, he still wasn't able to walk as fast as he used to. Finally he came to the turning that he had been looking for, waited to see if he could hear any voices, but there was only distant traffic, and birdsong, and the rustle of leaves. She was still sitting on the bench when he reached it, waiting for him.

"Hi." His greeting was hesitant, as was his smile.

Nothing hesitant about her smile. "Adam! I'm glad you've made it."

"You just missed seeing Mac, he got paged."

Adam didn't say that he'd missed Mac on purpose, walking slower and slower as he'd neared his destination. It was Stella who he'd come to see. "How are you?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm fine, never better. You?"

"I'm good, yeah." Her face was still pale, and both of them still played host to a spectre of pain, flitting almost constantly at the back of their thoughts. Knowing this, they were both content to take the half-truths at face value.

"Sit down," she insisted, as he seemed to be waiting for a prompt.

He sat down on the bench next to her, where Mac had been sitting a few minutes ago, and wished that he didn't still feel nervous in her presence. But then, maybe the nervousness was just who he was, and he should just accept it, as he was accepting the friendship growing between them. He'd been seeing a lot of her during the last month, at the hospital, and afterwards, during the days, when everyone was busy at work. (She'd been spending most of the evenings with Mac, and he doubted that he was mentioned then, certainly hoped that he wasn't.) And neither of them had spoken very much. There didn't seem to be very much to say, really. Generic things; 'How are you?', and 'What have you been doing?', but not much else. Nothing important.

Well, no time like the present. Some things had to be said, and he'd been turning over in his mind for a while the things that he needed to say, needed to tell her. He launched in without giving himself time to change his mind. "I didn't expect that I wasn't going to die."

Stella squeezed his hand tightly. "Oh, Adam." Her tone was sympathetic, almost apologetic, but he rushed on before she could say anything else.

"It's true. I thought I was dying, when we were in that – that place. When I opened my eyes at the hospital, I was confused. I wasn't upset, or thankful that I was alive, or anything, just confused." He still felt an echo of the surprise he had felt then. A note of shame crept into his voice. "I – I didn't even remember you were hurt, at first. I just wondered what I was doing, being not dead."

She frowned slightly, thinking back. "I don't remember what I thought. Everything was just… drifting." Shaking her head to dispel the memories she now tried to keep out of her dreams, she turned again to Adam, knowing that he needed reassurance, but not sure that she would be able to give enough of it. "You saved me, though. I do know that."

"Mac saved you. I couldn't have stopped it when the ceiling fell." But despite what he said, pride burned through him at her words, and he suddenly felt so much lighter. Maybe light enough to give him the courage to ask her what he'd been wondering every time he had seen her since – it – had happened.

"Do you know – " he began, and stopped. He didn't have enough courage, after all.

"Do I know what?" she asked. He looked away and began to twist the hem of the thin coat he was wearing, screwing the fabric into a tight knot.

"Doesn't matter."

"Doesn't it?" she persisted. At the look on his face, understanding hit her. "Do I know about what happened? What – what Mac did?"

"Yeah," he muttered.

"Yes, I know. Mac told me," she added. She didn't remember the moment of it herself. Didn't remember Mac's makeshift shield deflecting the falling concrete that would have crushed her skull and certainly killed her.

He nodded. She felt as if she was supposed to say something, but didn't know what.

_What do you say to someone? When your life was chosen over theirs?_

The wind whispered in the trees, and the sun tangled in her hair.

She was alive, Adam was miraculously still alive, but that _wasn't_ all that mattered, because to haunt all of them there would always be a _what if_. The very act of living made her at least partly responsible for the fact that Adam had come so close to dying. It wasn't something that could just be swept away beneath the carpet and forgotten about, but it was something they would have to live through and past, none the less.

Swifts danced their crazy patterns through the sky. A peacock butterfly alighted briefly by her foot.

There wasn't anything to say at all, not quite yet, so they just sat there, silently, just being alive, holding on to each other's presence, building themselves back up from the fragments that they had been left with in the aftermath of all the wrong choices, and the right choices too, while the sun slid along its set path in the sky, shade swinging round the sundial gnomon of the tree's trunk.

Until the shadows were all gone.

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**Fin**

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**A/N: Thank you for reading, and I really hope that you enjoyed it, please do let me know, especially if you haven't before! Thank you very much to everyone who's reviewed this, and added it to favourites and alerts, I very much appreciate it! :D**

**I'm sure I'll be writing something else soon, so I hope to see you again! Kate x**


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